About this Report
As an energy utility Nuon plays an important role in society. We therefore provide shareholders, consumers, politicians and employees with clear insight into our activities and results. We have a wide-ranging responsibility to inform all these groups.
Transparency is of the utmost importance for Nuon in order to gain the trust of its stakeholders. Openness enables stakeholders to keep track of our actions and results and to form a well-founded opinion on how we are performing as an organisation. Though transparency is sometimes at odds with commercial interests, we are still able to provide a lot of openness in our reports without affecting our competitive position. This is all the more important now that stakeholders are increasingly looking at sustainability issues alongside financial strategic policies. Interest in sustainability is growing strongly among shareholders. Nuon has many shareholders where this subject is high on the agenda and we consequently receive many questions from them on this subject. Our reports must therefore provide shareholders with sufficient insight into our activities in this field. In consultation with our shareholders we decided that our reports on Responsible Entrepreneurship would henceforth be published under the title Corporate Responsibility Report.
In line with this development the Management Board has decided to assign the same status to the Social Report for 2007 as to the Financial Annual Report. The Annual Report and the Social Report both follow the same process of approval and are now published simultaneously. For the coming years we expect to see a further integration of the two reports into a single corporate accountability document – just as the transition towards sustainability has become an integral part of Nuon’s strategy.
The transition towards a sustainable Nuon not only has the attention of our immediate stakeholders but is also an important issue among investors. Each year our reports must answer the question whether we are effecting that transition fast enough and what the implications of this are for our operational performance. Our reports must therefore provide clear insight into the considerations underlying our choices, actions and results.
Nuon’s annual report for 2006 was nominated for the Sijthoff Prize. In addition, the online financial information of Nuon received the best rating in a comparison of twenty unlisted companies. The direct access to sustainability information played an important role in this respect. This has encouraged us to again present the two reports in a single online environment, just as we did last year.
