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More growth momentum through profit improvement potential totalling ?1.5 billion
Germany
Thursday 05 February 2009
With "Shape 2012", the METRO Group is launching a comprehensive efficiency- and value-enhancing programme. "The aim is to ensure profitable growth of the company in the long term," says Dr. Eckhard Cordes, Chairman of the Management Board at METRO Group.
The Group’s structures will be simplified to realise the maximum growth momentum and customer orientation while significantly reducing costs. The intended potential for profit improvements until 2012 and beyond will amount to €1.5 billion. Half of this amount will result from cost savings.
The remaining amount is to be realised through improved productivity and other profit-enhancing measures. The profit improvements resulting from the programme will depend on the development of the macroeconomic conditions in our sales markets.
"Shape 2012" is designed to make METRO Group more transparent, customer conscious, less complex and more efficiently managed. As part of this process, the optimisation programmes already being carried out in the sales divisions will be integrated into "Shape 2012".
"The Management Board has been working on this strategy since last summer," Cordes says.
"The ‘Shape 2012’ programme is designed to improve the competitive position of METRO Group. As a result of the current economic climate, we are weatherising the company through the introduction of this programme. At the same time, we are staying on our growth path with ‘Shape 2012.’
METRO Group is acting from a position of commercial strength and is shaping change on its own." A fundamental principle at METRO Group will remain growth through international expansion. "Our focus," Cordes says, "is not just to simply add up cost-cutting targets. Rather, we intend to exploit the opportunities offered by greater and faster market penetration."
The guiding principle of the change is: as decentrally as possible, as centrally as necessary. The new structure will give employees more freedom to conduct operational business and will enable the sales divisions to satisfy the ever-changing needs of their customers in a flexible, fast and autonomous way. At the same time, those topics relevant for the strategic leadership, governance and controlling of the Group will be more centralised.
