Foreword

Dear readers,

Now more than ever, sustainable business management is key. This has been our tried-and-true practice for years, and we stand by it as our task is to find the right path to economic recovery.

Focusing on long-term, eco-friendly investments, while taking a balanced view of ecological and social needs when making economic decisions – these are the building blocks of stable business management. Verbund has successfully followed this course from the outset, and continues to do so today.

Our solid foundation of environmentally friendly energy production from hydropower secures our income, no matter how choppy the economic waters may be. We will continue to pursue this strategy: in the 2009 financial year, we expanded our power plant park by acquiring 13 hydropower plants in the Bavarian part of the Inn River, thereby reinforcing our core competencies. A number of additional projects to increase our hydraulic capacity are already under construction or in the planning stage; wind and photovoltaic facilities, along with the expansion of our thermal power plants, round out our portfolio of energy production sites.

Today, we provide 225,000 Austrian households, commercial and agricultural customers with clean energy from hydropower and also help our customers generate their own energy with solar power.

As part of our solar energy package, we and our partners plan photovoltaic facilities, support clients in obtaining federal grants and loans, supervise facility construction and take surplus energy that is not needed by households themselves. This is our contribution to ensuring that renewable sources of energy can be decentralised and used on a larger scale.

2009 marked the launch of an especially forward-looking project: electromobility. Verbund initiated the “Austrian Mobile Power” platform to focus on this issue, as we work to get 100,000 electric vehicles on the streets of Austria by 2020.

In November 2009, Austrian Minister Mitterlehner awarded us the “Work and Family Audit” certificate. A project team was devoted to the topic of work-life balance, highlighting the importance of our employees to our corporate success. After evaluating a wide array of existing offers to harmonise the work-life balance, the company engineered a package of measures that will assist our employees in better managing their private and professional obligations.

In the area of corporate citizenship as well, we moved a giant step ahead during the year under review. Thanks to our strong partners, we put our social responsibilities into action. In cooperation with Caritas Austria, we founded a special fund, “Verbund Stromhilfe Fonds der Caritas” that helps low-income households – regardless of their energy provider – to pay their electricity bills. We also offer these households a way to balance out their energy consumption for the long term: by offering energy consulting services and energy-efficient appliances, we help people and the environment.

Our second initiative “Verbund Empowerment Fund der Diakonie” is devoted to improving technical communication options for persons with disabilities who rely on electrical devices.

We are also breaking new ground with this Sustainability Report. We invited pupils of htl donaustadt to visit Verbund projects and put their impressions and experiences on paper. This is one step toward integrating outside viewpoints into our reports while capturing the views and opinions of those generations whose future we are contributing towards shaping with our projects.

We are particularly pleased to have received the Austrian Sustainability Reporting Award, despite the fact that we had not submitted our 2008 report, which was only available electronically. We were named “Long Term Winner” with a total of eight winning environmental and sustainability reports since 1999. We will make every effort to uphold this trend, and invite you to give us your feedback at sustain@verbund.at.