Chief Executive’s Review
- Introduction
- Financials
- Strategy
- Our operating model
- Investing for growth
- Safety
- Climate change
- People and talent
- Looking forward
Strategy
Last year I wrote about our intention to create a more focused business and to run our business in a more integrated way. We also recognised that we needed to enhance the discipline and rigour of the way in which we both operate and finance our business. Our continuing ambition is to provide higher returns for our shareholders while also delivering to our customers in a safe, efficient and reliable manner.
We can already demonstrate the substantial progress we have made against these commitments.
We have successfully reshaped our electricity and gas business, applying a greater focus in our principal growth markets in the UK and the US. Over the past year, we have exited from businesses that did not align with this focus. In April and August we completed the sale of our UK and US wireless businesses respectively – the proceeds of these sales doubled our initial investment. We also sold our Australian electricity interconnector in August for a 36% premium to invested capital and we sold our Advantica consulting business.
Our increased focus on the US was demonstrated on 24 August 2007 when we completed the acquisition of KeySpan, significantly growing our presence in North America and making National Grid the second largest electricity and gas company in the US by customer numbers.