2007 Year in review
Excellent financial performance positions De Lage Landen well for future growth.
• Net profit up 14% to €234 million
• De Lage Landen outperforms its global competition
• Fifth consecutive year of double-digit net profit growth
Backed by an excellent 2007 financial performance in a tough market environment, De Lage Landen has equipped itself for continued future growth. De Lage Landen successfully expanded in the Nordic and Central Eastern Europe regions, implemented a global business unit structure and made strong progress with efficiency measures to standardize systems and processes worldwide. De Lage Landen managed to continue its strong performance of recent years. Net profit grew from €206 million ($259 million) to €234 million ($321 million). The lease portfolio increased by €1.8 billion ($2.6 billion) to €20.7 billion ($30.5 billion).* This represents a 9.6% increase compared to the year-end volume of 2006. De Lage Landen’s business units Car Lease and Financial Institutions were main contributors to this performance. Athlon Car Lease outperformed the market significantly.
Global company
Over the last years, De Lage Landen has become a real global company, regarding both its geographical reach and the composition of its member community. Today, over 2% of the company’s member population is carrying out expat-assignments and the Eindhoven office for example employs members from 29 different nationalities. De Lage Landen has gained a lot of experience in structuring and managing global joint ventures with our vendor partners and is currently using these skills and capabilities to expand its businesses.
Vendor finance
In the 4th quarter of 2007, De Lage Landen entered into acquisition agreements regarding IT Finans AS, a Norwegian broker company as well as Siemens Leasing Kft. and Siemens Finance Zrt. in Hungary. IT Finans is originally known as a provider of finance solutions in the home-PC market, but has also developed strongly into typical De Lage Landen business segments. With this acquisition, De Lage Landen significantly strengthened both its market share and presence in the Nordic region.
In Central and Eastern Europe, De Lage Landen had already successfully started activities with Cargobull Finance, its joint venture with Schmitz Cargobull. The Siemens acquisition positions De Lage Landen very well to enter other strategically important industry segments in this region, such as Office Equipment, Technology Finance, Materials Handling, Food & Agri and Healthcare.
In its Dutch home market, De Lage Landen unit Financial Institutions achieved record-breaking new business volume in equipment lease, surpassing the €1 billion mark for the first time.
Car lease
De Lage Landen invested significant effort into the integration of Translease and Athlon Car Lease in the Netherlands, which is expected to be concluded in 2008. Meanwhile, car lease maintained both its commercial and customer focus in 2007. Car lease showed an excellent performance in 2007 that outperformed the market by a considerable margin. Translease and Athlon Car Lease were voted best and second best lease company in the Netherlands, respectively (source: Heliview 2007 Fleet
Management Survey). In addition, Athlon Car Lease entered the Polish market in 2007.
Consumer finance
De Lage Landen has become Rabobank Group’s competence center for consumer finance in The Netherlands. It has also established a direct and active market approach with its brand Freo. Freo, which was launched in August 2007, offers transparent consumer financing via on line channels.
Factoring
Factoring is De Lage Landen’s fourth core activity aimed at the Dutch market. Following a large restructuring, the new factoring organization was rolled out in April 2007. In the Netherlands, De Lage Landen has added specific factoring functionalities to its already existing lease application. These functionalities enable local Rabobanks to autonomously process factoring requests on line. New business volume in 2007 showed a substantial increase of 43%.
