We remain true to our goal of informing all capital market participants comprehensively, transparently and in a timely manner of the Company’s performance and the strategies and measures adopted. Especially in difficult economic times this is a prerequisite for gaining and retaining shareholders’ trust. We therefore continued to develop our investor relations activities in 2008. The Executive Board and the Investor Relations team informed investors worldwide about the operative and strategic developments at Lufthansa in a total of 33 road shows and ten investor conferences. Altogether we held more than 450 individual and group meetings with institutional investors and analysts in the reporting period (previous year: 400). This was in addition to the regular face-to-face meetings and conference calls to comment on the quarterly financial statements.
We held our traditional Investor Day on 25 June 2008, at our Munich hub. The focus of the event was on providing greater insight into hub management, the cooperation and investment strategy and the Group initiative “Upgrade to Industry Leadership”. We informed the capital markets in a timely fashion in the course of quarterly reporting and via the monthly Investor Info and other relevant news from the business segments. In addition to ongoing communications, credit investors were informed of the latest developments by three issues of our Creditor Info.
Private shareholders were notified of important events at Lufthansa by means of five issues of the shareholder Information. We also made Company presentations at three private shareholder forums with a total of 750 investors and provided detailed answers to their questions.
The Internet is becoming ever more important in terms of providing the capital markets with timely information. The number of visits to our website remained very high at around one million visits in 2008. The online publication of communiqués, speeches and other important information is now taken for granted, not only at Lufthansa. The speeches of the Chairman of the Supervisory Board and the CEO at the Annual General Meeting can also be followed live on the Internet. We have also expanded our online services and restructured our website to enable rapid, user-friendly navigation. These are to be extended yet further in 2009 by additional features. Included will be an easily accessible online version of this Annual Report in accordance with the latest technical standards.
We give high priority to meeting all the relevant standards in capital market communications. These include the German Corporate Governance Code and the requirements of the Deutsche Börse. We have again been successful in doing so in 2008.
