Over the course of the past five decades, we have crafted strategies and provided solutions that have mutually benefited the shareholders, customers, communities and society at large. Now in our 50th year, we stand re-energized and are very fortunate to be critically positioned to provide leadership for tomorrow’s issues. As we march ahead in 2016, I have full faith in the resources of the Company and the commitment of its people to advance Engro on the path of success for another 50 years.
Khalid Siraj Subhani
President
We continued to create positive returns for a wide category of stakeholders and distributed PKR 89 billion of wealth amongst employees, government, investors and communities, while our total shareholder return grew by 33% in 2015, significantly higher than the 2% return provided by KSE 100. With a head of delivering performance, we registered double-digit bottom-line growth and our market capitalization grew by PKR 30 billion to more than PKR 146 billion.
The Company’s businesses maintained a strong performance following a prudent consolidation strategy where the fertilizer business acquired the trading arm – Engro Eximp – which now performs end-to-end trading for the Company’s blended fertilizer portfolio.
On the other hand, Engro EXIMP Agriproducts has been merged under Engro Corporation and launched wheat and rice brands under the umbrella of ‘Onaaj’ through the year. Fertilizers continued growth trends and increased its sales by 43%, while making steady gains in the market share of urea and declaring a profit of PKR 14.8 billion.
On the energy front, our focus remains on exploring groundbreaking alternatives to power the country. Engro secured the loan financing for the Thar Coal Project in Beijing, enabling us to venture into both mining and power generation projects in the Thar coal field – a historic milestone since the project remains one of the priority projects under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Apart from local energy projects, Engro’s first overseas power plant – GEL Utility Limited– completed its first year of operations successfully.
While we continued our growth trajectory on the business front, the well-being of the people at Engro remained a key focus area for us. Through the year, Human Resource teams across the group deployed various measures to improve our overall organizational health – our Employee Engagement Index improved by 9% on a consolidated basis taking it to 71%, signaling that Engro employees are motivated by the company's mission and its ability to foster and execute innovative and smarter strategies.
One of the key philosophies at Engro is to create sustainable livelihoods under the ambit of Engro Foundation by implementing the business inclusiveness model. The purpose is to target “bottom of the pyramid” communities around our business operations and raising their economic conditions.
The people at Engro continued to impact our host communities by volunteering for a variety of causes for the under-privileged individuals and making an effort to improve their lives through monetary and non-monetary contributions. By year end, employees had clocked an astounding 14,000+ volunteer hours in service of the nation – which is considerably higher than that of last year.