Chairman's statement

For Heurtey Petrochem, 2010 offers three key reasons for satisfaction: The return to growth: our turnover rose 17% to €235 million, which brought it back to where it was prior to the financial crisis. During the year, new orders also grew in line with business development, leaving us with an order book worth 13 months' turnover at end-2010. Robust financial results: improved results (operating profit up 27%, and net profit, group share up 65%), thanks to good performance by all of the Group's entities and good control of project execution.

• Confirmation of our strong positioning in Emerging Markets: Asia accounted for half of our consolidated turnover in 2010, while India alone represented one third of new orders.

We continued to develop our regional presence:

• in India, where our subsidiary Heurtey Petrochem India (which is now the Group's main engineering and project-management centre) enabled us to take full advantage of the country's impressive industrial expansion.
• in Russia, where our Saint Petersburg subsidiary enables us to do business directly with major Russian oil companies such as Gazpromneft, Rosneft, Loukoil and Alliance.

In our Beta Heurtey plant in Romania, we launched a performance plan which had already resulted in considerable productivity gains by end-2010.

In the spring of 2011, we acquired 60% of Prosernat, a particularly efficient engineering company whose technologies have earned it an international reputation.

We are going to broaden the scope of our activities to include Natural Gas treatment, an expanding business area that ideally complements our traditional refining and petrochemicals activities.

We enter 2011 fully confident of the health of our markets and of our ability to continue our development.

Dominique Henri – Chairman and CEO

heurtey petrochem 27.01.11 par LaCoteBleue-TV