Sustainable business practices are a key part of our corporate strategy and help to ensure our long-term success. Our approach to sustainability focuses on the following factors: the environment, people, society and the success of our business. It influences our system of corporate governance as well as our Group’s ethics guidelines.

Our separate Sustainability Report highlights exactly what we do in order to live up to our environmental and social responsibilities. This report will be published for the first time in the first half of 2006 and will combine our environmental, human resources and social reporting. Extensive information about these topics is also available on our website under “Sustainability”.

Best German company in the Good Company Ranking
Deutsche Post World Net has received an award for the way in which it fulfills its social responsibilities. In the September 2005 Good Company Ranking drawn up by Manager Magazin, a German business publication, we were the highest-ranked German company and took third place overall. The journal ranked 80 European companies on the basis of staff support, social commitment, environmental protection, financial performance and transparency – the first time that this has been done.

Attractive for investors with an eye on sustainability
On September 20, 2005, Deutsche Post was again included in the FTSE4Good Europe sustainability index, one of the best-known indices of its kind. This indicates that we have satisfied certain criteria to which environmentally and socially conscious investors pay considerable attention when making investment decisions.

Strategic partnership with the United Nations
On December 15, 2005, we signed a far-reaching partnership agreement with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). One of the goals of the planned partnership between the UN bodies and Deutsche Post World Net is the swift organization of logistic support when disaster strikes.

One of the ideal areas for cooperation is the coordination of emergency aid logistics at airports in the affected areas. Our first step is to set up a global network of highly trained Disaster Response Teams, which can be deployed quickly to any location worldwide, where their job might be to optimize the management of incoming relief supplies at airports.

In the course of 2005, we were able to demonstrate our professional capability to handle logistics bottlenecks at airports on many occasions: a team of DHL logistics experts was deployed in response to major natural disasters, including the tsunami in South-East Asia, the hurricanes that battered the southeast coast of the United States and the earthquake in the Kashmir region of Pakistan.