Relations with stakeholders

We are committed to having a constructive dialogue with all stakeholders to ensure we understand what is important to them and allow ourselves the opportunity to present our position. Engagement helps us identify new risks and opportunities to ensure that our long-term strategy is sustainable. In some instances we find that working with stakeholders in partnership can help deliver shared goals. We might not be able to satisfy all stakeholder concerns all the time but through engagement we can do our best to balance competing demands. We know that customers need to be able to trust our business and they will only trust us if we do the right thing by all our stakeholders. Our programme of engaging with stakeholders including customers, staff, suppliers, investors, non-governmental organisations and others, is set out in more detail in the Corporate Responsibility Review and on our website. The addition of Community to our strategy this year and our Community Plans in each country have helped to demonstrate our commitment to tackling a wide range of societal and environmental issues. We also carry out external research to help us understand how well we are addressing stakeholder concerns.

We are committed to maintaining a good dialogue with shareholders through proactively organising meetings and presentations as well as responding to a wide range of enquiries. We seek shareholder views on a range of issues from strategy to corporate governance and SEE issues. We recognise the importance of communicating appropriately any significant Company developments. This shareholder communication is mainly co-ordinated by the Investor Relations department. During the year, the Group met with most of our leading shareholders representing over 70% of the issued shares of the Company. To complement this programme, the Chairman meets with major shareholders independently from the Executive team. Shareholders also have the opportunity to meet with the Senior Independent Non-executive Director. The Board is kept updated on the views of stakeholders.

It is normal that institutional shareholders may be in more regular contact with the Group than others, but care is exercised to ensure that any price-sensitive information is released to both institutional and private shareholders at the same time, in accordance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements.