Despite a recent downturn in IPO and other corporate activities, both revenue and profit from all businesses has been in line with our budget expectations. Shareholder numbers continue to grow, and show an increase of 29% to 69 million shareholder accounts.

An important challenge faced by us all this year was to streamline our business and create service productivity and efficiency gains. To a large extent we have achieved this by flattening management structures and improving work processes. In addition, we have completed the integration of Document Services, Plan Managers and Analytics to create our unique, fully integrated service offering to companies and shareholders.

Our technology has also played a key role in improving efficiency and, crucially, adding significant improvements to our service standards.

Overview
Of particular note is the recent implementation of our Investor Contact Centre in Melbourne, which was officially opened in June by the Victorian Minister for State and Regional Development, the Honourable John Brumby MP. The Investor Contact Centre provides services to shareholders and other incoming callers, as well as initiating calls to shareholders on behalf of companies.

Our registry businesses in the US and Canada have taken this a step further, where the most up-to-date telephony technology is able to handle incoming communications whether they are received by telephone, e-mail or fax.This technology will be deployed throughout the world over the coming months and will bring significant improvements for both external and internal communication management.

The introduction of the Investor Centre on our web site (www.computershare.com) brings to Australian shareholders, for the first time, a portfolio view of all shareholdings in Australian companies whose share registers are serviced by Computershare as well as valuations of their portfolio. When a shareholder is registered for the first time, they will be provided with a secure identification number that will enable them to affect changes to their details maintained on the share register. Over the coming months it is planned to add even more services to our Investor Centre and to implement the same service in all other markets.

Our focus on service standards and general gains in efficiency are aimed at positioning our businesses for growth and will continue throughout the coming financial year. We are already seeing the results in all our operations, where research is indicating a significant improvement in service levels. Even greater improvements are contemplated in the US, Canada and Hong Kong following the migration of companies onto our proprietary share registry software (SCRIP) by the end of June 2002.

We have been encouraged this year with our successes at winning new business in most of our markets.In some cases we have been able to win business away from our competitors and in others (particularly the United Kingdom) we were successful in winning a significant portion of floats and demutualisations that came into that market.

The US has experienced further consolidation of share registries with the exit of the original banks who had partial ownership in the two key competitors. Despite this, service offerings to companies remain fragmented, with Employee Plans and Analytics services managed by a diverse range of service providers. In this context we believe we have a strong competitive edge through our fully integrated approach that brings all these services together. This is further enhanced by our ability to service these companies through our international offices.

It is also reasonable to suggest that US companies do not have a tendency to be tied to a particular service provider. They are willing to consider change, and value the creative and efficient use of technology.

The outlook for the coming year augurs well in all businesses. Our global spread combined with our breadth and depth of services combine to create the only global, fully integrated share registry service in the world. Our successful moves towards greater efficiencies, productivity and our focus on superior service will continue throughout the year, creating a framework for growth and success over the coming months.

Computershare Analytics Services (CAS)
During the course of this year Computershare acquired Citywatch Limited in the UK and Financial Data Concepts LLC in the US. These acquisitions have been fully integrated into the existing Computershare Analytics business and are central to our strategy of building a global share ownership database. Both Citywatch and FDC are leaders in the online provision of share ownership information in the UK and US equity markets.

We recently undertook the third annual Computershare Investor Relations Practice Survey that highlighted the growing use of technology in investor communications. With this in mind we are exploring several opportunities to develop further online products as well as expanding into Canada and South Africa.

Computershare Analytics is in its formation year and consequently we are not providing segment eporting this year.

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