For me, the most significant milestone last year was the acquisition and turnaround of our new service arm, Fujitsu Siemens Computers IT Product Services (ITPS). This was a significant step in our history, enabling us to deliver a better service to our customers across the extended value chain and paving the way for a major force in the IT marketplace.

Looking at the figures in isolation, fiscal 2006/2007 produced mixed results. On the one hand, we almost hit the seven billion euro revenue mark for the first time in our seven-year history. Partly fuelled by the extension of our service capabilities, this shows that our strategy is already bearing fruit. In addition, a higher-margin mix helped grow our profit before tax and restructuring by 10 percent to 150 million euros.

On the other hand, however, hardware revenue dropped in some areas. For good reason, let me add. We refused to artificially bump up our figures with loss-making deals. Overstocks from last Christmas and large-scale dumping of non-RoHS-compliant products mid-year resulted in fierce competition and aggressive price wars. But we stuck to our guns and focused only on profitable business. So putting our results in context, we can actually be proud of the fact that we managed to hold our own.

Against this turbulent backdrop, I am convinced that we made the necessary changes to drive our performance forward. Our new sales strategy, which differentiates between the value and volume business, focuses on delivering more value to our customers and building stronger relationships. Our service capabilities are a key success factor in this strategy. The synergies across our platform and service businesses have already been instrumental in winning major new customers with end-to-end solutions. The upshot of these and other similar changes was a positive trend evident in the second half of fiscal 2006/2007, which has continued into the current fiscal year.

At this point, I would like to say a special word to our employees. Nobody ever said the integration of about 4,000 new employees from ITPS was going to be smooth sailing. In fact, the integration process is still ongoing. We need to give ourselves time to harmonize different cultural and business backgrounds. But there’s nothing unusual in that. What is unusual is the speed with which our ITPS colleagues managed to turn around the service business. Another impressive tribute to our employees was the agreement we reached in Germany to increase working hours and defer pay raises to secure the future of our company. On behalf of the Executive Board, I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of our employees for their flexibility and active contribution to our success.