Randstad N.V. (AMS:RAND)

AGM 2019

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Mar 26, 2019

I've never seen a diamond in the flesh. I cut my teeth on wedding rings in the movies and I'm not proud of my address. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to open the meeting. Welcome. We appreciate your participation in this meeting. I'm also pleased to welcome everybody listening to our meeting on the website. In some preliminary interviews, you'll understand that this is not the first AGM Sligero had their Annual General Meeting before us, but this is one of the first. We have interpretation by interpreters into English. If you would like a headset, they're available from the hostesses at the entrance. And the hostesses will also have microphones so that you can ask questions. What is said will be recorded on audio. The convening notice and the complete agenda and corresponding documents have been available from 12 February 2019 on RANSAS's website and were made available. The convening notice mentioned that shareholders have the opportunity prior to this meeting to submit questions in writing, which may be addressed today. Nobody took advantage of this opportunity. The convening notice also stated that shareholders unable to attend the meeting may provide voting instructions to an independent third party, which is the SGG in Amsterdam. Seated at the Board table are the members of the Executive Board, Chris Houghting, Francois Berraer Raelle, Linda Gallipot, Henry Schirmer and Jacques van den Bluc. As for the Supervisory Board members, Jaap Pinter, Frank Doier, Annette Aras, Rudy Provost and Barbara Bora. Henri Giscard D'Estaen is unable to attend, unfortunately. We also have Bas Safford and Peter Bommel from Deloitte Auditors Firm. Please rise for a moment. At Agenda Item 2C, which is the You're familiar with our founder and shareholder, Fritz Goldschmading joining us. Unfortunately, he's unable to be here today, but he sends you his best regards. Registration for the meeting closes at 3:15. After that, the attendance list will be drafted and the secretary will report how many individuals entitled to vote are present and how many votes may be cast. I hereby designate Yelemidimah as secretary to the meeting. The draft minutes for this meeting will be made available within 3 months and will be posted on the website. After that, you'll have 3 months to respond to the draft minutes. The minutes will then be adopted by me and the secretary. At the registration, disc copies of the minutes from last year's meeting were available. This year, we will once again be using voting handsets. If they don't work, we will vote by acclamation or show of hands, and we will be recording those voting against or abstaining. Upon entering the room, you have found a voting handset and you received your voting card at the registration desk. The instructions for how to vote will be described by Jelle Mirama at the first agenda item that we vote on. We will now move on to agenda item 2A, which is the report on 2018. At this agenda item, we will be discussing the report by the Executive and Supervisory Boards on 2018B. Our implementation of remuneration policy in 2018 the proposal to adopt the financial statements from 2018 at D, explanation of the policy on reserves and dividends at E, the proposal to determine the regular dividend over the financial year 2018 and finally, at 2F, the proposal to determine a special dividend over the 2018 financial year. First, I'm pleased to give the floor to Jacques van den Broek, who will deliver a presentation about the general course of events in 2018. And afterwards, Henry Schirmer will deliver presentation about the financials and other items mentioned. The presentation will be projected on the screen in English because it coincides simultaneously with the presentation on our English website. Most of those attending via our website are foreign shareholders and other interested parties abroad. Jacques, good afternoon. Here we are again. I'm glad to have this opportunity to review last year together with you. It looks like it was fine here. There was one highlight, and I'd like to share that with you on the following video. Hi. This is really Fritsch's bike, the very first bike where he delivers his 1st direct mail. And rumor has it, even his first steps to his clients here in Amsterdam. But why am I riding Fritz's bike? There's a special occasion. Please follow me inside and I'll tell you more. I got a very special announcement. When Fritz founded the company in 1960, of course, he wanted to be the best and maybe ultimately the biggest. And he did, in the Netherlands and in Belgium, Germany, and we've taken the journey forward. Countries like Spain and Canada, Singapore, so many more countries. And that ultimately today has amounted to where we are, the number one market leader in the world. So how do we become the best and the biggest and the number one? Because of you. Because of you and your close to 39,000 colleagues around the globe, putting people to work every day. Just one more, and just one more, and just one more. And I want to congratulate you on your success, on our success, And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. So now, it's a historic moment. And I want you to enjoy the moment with your teams, with your regions and talk about what you did to participate in the success of Randstad and of course, what the plans are going forward. Enjoy the moment. Thank you very much. So, it was 36 degrees centigrade the day I recorded that. And we thought that we would have passed that in the Q2. So this video was broadcast to all our coworkers all over the world on November 6. I was in New York, and I rang Fritz. And you know that Fritz keeps telling me that I'm not growing fast enough. He's been saying that for years and he's right. And I asked, did you ever expect us to be the biggest in the world? And he said, well, not really because Adecco was at the top for a long time since 1996. And then when Adecco merged with the German Swiss Adecco and the French AdeA, we accounted for onethree of Adecco's revenue. 4 years ago, we were behind by over €3,000,000,000 So it was great that we achieved that in the 3rd quarter. And some of you may say, well, what about the 4th quarter? That's true. But in the Q1, we grew faster if you're basing yourself on Adecco's report. So we expect to exceed Adecco again in Q1, but we'll have to wait and see. So we're very pressed strategically. This doesn't really mean that much. We have 6% of the global market as the market leader, so there's a lot of room for growth. But for our own people, this instills us with great pride. In our profession, what matters is addressing your customers and candidates with lots of self confidence and pride. So that's a wonderful climax that we shared with Fritz. And 2018 was a year in which we did all kinds of things. And I'd like to cover a few of them with you. We broadcast Human Forward. That's our new brand proposition. And we tell our people that our purpose is to support people and organizations in realizing their true potential. Of course, the labor market is very dynamic. Customers are concerned about finding the right people in their country and worldwide. And as for candidates, it's really fascinating to see the uncertainty about the future. And it's strange because we greatly need labor. But it's strange why people don't stay at the job they have. That's what we want to help people do, reach their true people. And we believe that this remains a magnificent mission in life. Now as for a year, Henri is going to tell you more about the figures resilient portfolio paying off. What does that mean? We're everywhere in the world, and the economic cycle does not exist as such. Each country varies. In America, we saw very stable growth. Last year, well, actually the year before that, 2017, Southern Europe was the big growth area. This year's Asia Pacific, Australia, Japan, countries such as Singapore. As I showed in the video, we're market leader there too. And that means that our growth is fairly stable. Well, we made more both as a percentage of revenue and in absolute terms. And we also achieved a record high cash dividend, as you probably discovered. So our EBITDA margin progression is excellent. Growth tapered off. We started the year with 7% growth and especially because of the drive from Europe, we saw that tapering off, especially in the automotive industries such as in Germany and France. It doesn't feel like a recession. It feels like a short break, but that industry is on the move And substantial EBITDA and 4.7 percent EBITDA margin, which is 10 basis points more than the year before. As for recruitment and selection, about 250,000 people will find a job once with us. In addition to all the temps that we place, they're an increasingly important share of our revenue. As for Rest of World, that was the portfolio I mentioned comprising Australia, Japan, a hugely important market. That's the 2nd market in the world, even though it remains relatively small, it's a very fine market for us. The average temp placement is 8 or 9 months over there. And in Europe, it's 12 or 13 weeks. So that's very attractive for us when we find jobs for people there too. And unemployment is low and the profitability is above the group average. As for digital, I'm sure you know that by now we're busy transforming the company in terms of data use. I'll give you some example. There are many. A few of the highlights hope should bring us toward our goal where we offer our customers and our candidates a way of doing business with us that suits them. It might be drinking a cup of coffee or them simply entrusting everything to us the old fashioned way, or it can be entirely online. There are many customers that seek their temps from our databases, whatever they want, candidates, mobile applications, anything they want. In addition, as job recruitment officers, we want to surround ourselves with the best possible means to do our job. 1 is what we call digital sales, data driven sales. Now that means that the job recruitment officers can check their mobile or their laptop every morning to see where they can go and what where customers are looking for temps. They can go visit that customer and show that customer, the market for a local welder or local secretary. So they can interact with those customers to see how they can meet their demand. And what Henry really likes, there's also pricing tool where you can say this is what it will cost you. And that helps our job recruitment officers and they have wonderful conversations with their customers. And we tested that in the past 3 years in the Netherlands, in America and in France. And Rene is in charge of our digital factory, and he's building in Belgium for the rest of the world so that we can, send our job recruitment officers on their way all over the world. And then we've got a solution that Francois came up with in France, and that's workforce scheduling. Now here's what it means. We go to a customer and we say, do you we ask them whether they schedule their staff. Yes, they do. They've got an Excel file. That's not a scheduling tool. These may be customers who employ a few 100 and they have difficulty keeping track of all shifts and all scheduling and production to make sure that they're fully staffed. We give them a ready made planning system. It doesn't cost a thing. That's from our innovation fund. That's how we invested. And then we equip all temps with their own Randstad app so that they can schedule themselves in that system. So the customer can simply sit back and have his scheduling needs met, and we keep track of it. By now, over 1,000 companies in France to start with, but by now, on 6 markets such as America, Italy, Germany, we're rolling it out everywhere. It's thriving. And then candidates. We assume that in most places of the world, nobody is actively looking for a job. So we have to bring those jobs to people. I say we've turned into an Amazon for candidates where we keep saying people such as you work there and people such as you might switch jobs. That's what we're building all over the world for 200000000000 to 300000000000 people. And if a candidate says, I'm interested in that, they can present themselves to the job recruitment officer on a video. And after that, the interview is arranged. We call that candidate engagement. And that's an extremely important development for our company. These are the different paces of growth in Rest of World from over 10%, that's the yellow line. North America has been growing continuously for the past 5 or 6 years. Europe, you can see a tapering off, as I mentioned, but that group is still growing. Now relative growth. We're the blue line. And you can see that in the past 2 years or so, or 3 years, 4 years, we've been growing faster than the competition. And if you keep that up, you end up being the biggest. Now even if growth tapers off, what matters is how you perform with respect to your customer. And you see some general trends here, and you see what's happening in Europe. Last year, for example, Italy achieved 26% growth. This year's 8%. As for Spain and Portugal, you see Europe tapering off, but not in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is doing well. Since the end of last year, the Netherlands is outperforming the market. That's excellent considering the market share. And we don't take each customer. We went to make a profit on our customer. So it's basically a fine performance. France, Belgium and North America shows the opposite trend. And here again you see Rest of the World, constant growth. And this is the chart of how our revenue is distributed. That's a nice spread. Later on, we'll talk about the appointment of 2 new members of the Executive Board. Basically, we said, okay, America is already by far our biggest business, but we have only a 3% market share in America. In the Netherlands, we have about 25%, but America is the largest market in the world, and we have only 3% there. So we decided that we wanted somebody from the Board to be fully dedicated to that. And another trend that you don't see over here increasingly, we have large international customers that we serve with the staff throughout the world, and we have a company within the company where those large companies are served in all Randstad countries, and we do that source wide. So that's why we've said that large customers, which account for over a quarter of our revenue now, we want to focus on them. So we've got 2 people who are going to manage our growth from the Executive Board in that extremely important market. Now this shows what we're doing. I'll start with the Randstad Innovation Fund, which has existed for 5 years. We have 17 investments, especially 2,500 startup firms in our industry have decided they don't want to be in for surprises and they want to be at the vanguard in our industry. Pay attention. We have some local innovations, as I indicated. Francois and his coworkers in France came up with workforce scheduling, that data driven sales navigator. In the Netherlands and America, our biggest countries are often at the vanguard at innovations. Then we've got the digital factory, where we take small, very successful ideas and roll them out all over the world. Occasionally, We'll purchase something to accelerate innovations. We saw a presentation at the Supervisory Board meeting of we saw OZ, that's a company that we purchased 2 years ago. It delivers excellent technology services to IT and engineering customers. Then we have global concepts. We started as a local firm. We always try to get people jobs close to the customer and close to home. But increasingly, we have global businesses that do business all over the world. Rebecca is going to cover that. And those are global businesses such as Source Right, RISE Smart, that's digital outplacement. We'll find you a job using technology. And then we have Global Client Solutions. We've been running that for 20 years, and that also serves international customers. That's how we grow. But change is hard. I'm glad we started in time. 5 years ago, we decided that we want to transform the company while we're doing well. And we want to start based on a position of self confidence and success. We want to grow and we want to be ahead of the market and we want to be faster than our competitors. It's not just about technology. It's mainly about changing ways of work. And of course, we want technology to enhance business results and drive growth. We're becoming increasingly dependent on data, so we need to protect our data. It needs to be accessible everywhere, and we invest a lot of time in that as well. And it's also about having an open mind about learning, experimenting about learning by trial and error. I've been at this company for 30 years, and I always debated with Ben Notte Bohm to see who had the most unsuccessful investment for the company. We as leaders of Veranda, we say it's important to experiment. It's important to learn from trial and error. And then ultimately, you want to reduce your mistakes and get back on track for growth. Now unfortunately, Fritz is not with us, but we often talk to Fritz about the objectives. Now the core values are still very dynamic. What's wonderful is that nowadays, we have a lot of millennials working here. My kids' age, so ages 20 to 25. And they want to add something to the world. They don't just want to make money. They don't just want to, ride a fancy car. They want to mean something for the world. And that's where those values resurface. Over the years, we've had some difficult years. It was difficult to get things going. But now in a company with 38,000 employees in 4,800 branches in 39 countries off the top of my head, everything is dynamic. Everything is alive. And that's wonderful to see. And the larger we grow, the more we can do. Increasing, we can add to our stakeholders all over the world. Now the tone at the top matters for us. We visit customers and branches a lot to speak with the job recruitment officers and see what this means in our discipline and what to find out what worries customers and to talk with candidates to see what they're worried about concerning their jobs for the future and how we can help them. As for transparency and clear and open communication, including today, we focus on integrity. That's one of our core values and good governance. And of course, we have a magnificent Supervisory Board for that. And I'm serious. Sustainability. Nowadays, everybody wants to be sustainable. That's sexy. In the late '70s, in his annual report, Fritz already wrote that a company would lose its raison d'etre unless it had social added value. So we were all raised with that idea. That's standard for us. We've been playing a key role in society since 1960. Work is becoming more and more important. Pick up any newspaper. Where are the jobs going? Will I keep my job? In the Netherlands, we're going to have a labor shortage of 100,000 people. Where will we find them? We have to train people. How will we keep running health care? This all relates to our core business, which is finding people jobs. We have some specific questions that we received. One is about living wage and how remuneration at Randstad relates to the living wage. It's difficult to compare because there is no international definition of living wage. I can say that at Randstad, we're always very eager to emancipate flexible work. We try to get collective labor agreements for flex workers off the ground everywhere. Our flex workers in Germany earn far better wages, I think perhaps 100% more than the minimum wage in Germany, 100% more. So that's double the minimum wage. And we always get excited about that because we know that, it's important to protect our mutual interests. As for social programs, we have over 90 very focused social programs, serving people with disabilities, serving people who are disadvantaged on the labor market. We train thousands of people a year to get their skills up to labor market needs. And you can see all our programs featured there, including our partnerships with clients and governments, accommodating those sustainable development goals. Some of them are from the United Nations. And this is what it looks like. As I said, by 2,030, we aim to impact about 500,000,000 people in their working lives. Of course, a few million will find permanent or temporary jobs, will be training a great many people will be advised about their future on the job market by us. Many people use our tools online to obtain information and to sit for tests. There's too much to name. And for the first time, we describe the program. It always starts at our values. We've got a few basics. And we hope that all this will be conducive to economic growth and more people being connected, inclusive employment. There is no more noble objective for us than having everybody work everywhere, and we want to contribute to that. And at the end of the day, we want to help make the job market better and align it more closely. So what we do is more relevant than ever, and we hope this will culminate in those 500,000,000 people, and we'll be keeping you informed every year about our progress. That was what I had to share with you, and I'm going to hand you over to Henri, who will walk you through the figures. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Henrik Sjedra. I'm the new CFO. Maybe the last time I'm saying this. I'm going to do the presentation in English. I hope that's all right. Should you have questions later on in Dutch, you can always ask them in Dutch. It won't be a problem. But I'll just give the presentation in English. Performance of 2018. So I don't have a very nice movie, but I certainly brought good numbers. So in 2018, when you just look at the P and L in front of you, what are we really trying to do if we just step back for a second? We always try to grow ahead of our competition, and the 4% growth you're seeing here is certainly in the key markets we are winning share. And at the same time, we'd like to progress our profitability and then turn profitability into cash flow and dividends. Or using the financial freedom to invest into even more growth. That's also fine. So if you just look into the P and L with a little more detail, 4% revenue growth. Jacques was already alluding to the fact that actually all single concepts we had all regions were contributing to that growth. So we have a very resilient portfolio, which is really good. We were reporting a gross margin of 19.8%, 40 basis points down, so 0.4 percentage points, but underlying stable. I will go into that a little more detail. But that came in actually slightly better than it was expected. And then very good cost management. You see that our costs just went up for 1%, which therefore then actually enabled us to show a slightly higher profitability going from 4.6% in 2017 to 4.7% in 2018. When we look at the reported net income, you see that our numbers went up by 10%. But please note that there is actually 2 one offs in there. So we had an impairment of our Monster goodwill in those numbers when you go down there. But we also had a one off tax benefit, which more or less watches each other out so that we had a very good net income to be reported. A little more detail now on the gross margin. You see on the left side 20.2 percent went down to 19.8 percent. And when you just look into those components, there's on the first red bar, 0.3% gross margin going down. That is broadly speaking, half of that is due to the changes of what we call the CICE subsidies in France, which were changed in 2018 compared to 2017. And the other half comes, broadly speaking, through our fast growing in house business, which drew 9%. So we've now about 2,000 locations in there, which come with a lower gross margin but actually transfer really well into EBITDA. The middle green bar, you see a positive impact of 20 basis points. That comes from our faster growing perm business, which grew by 13%. And it's all income. So therefore, it's a good positive mix. And the red bar on the right, it's mainly due to the fact that our Monster business continued to decline and therefore is dropping down the gross margin by about 30 basis points. When we look into what we call the OpEx, the operational expenses in our P and L, also there. Actually, we faced the year which was not entirely easy to be managed. When we just look how the growth came in, the first half was about 6% growth. Then quarter 3 was 3%, quarter 4, around flat. And that is always a challenge for a business then to really adjust the cost base quickly. But I must say, coming to that business, there's a really strong capability here, which made it relatively easy for me as CFO. And you see the benefit. Actually, we had only 1% operational costs going up, but you see also a big movement in the €82,000,000 that is, broadly speaking, the dollar euro exchange rate which comes to play. But that was really, really important to protect our profitability and actually even improve it slightly. That's actually one of my favorite charts here. So the headline, resilient free cash flow and balance sheet, record dividend. On the left, improved free cash flow. So we delivered CHF627,000,000 free cash flow for the year, which was 70% up to 2017. And we've had a strong, what we call, working capital improvement. The really good news of our business, if growth is coming down a little bit, we are using less working capital from in our business. And that releases extra cash flow into our free cash flow, there was an impact of €80,000,000 in 2018. And it's really proving our business model. So either we have a good cycle and we're growing and we're adding profitability and cash flow, but also in times where it comes down a little bit, we've actually really good cash flow in there. On the right hand side, the strong balance sheet, you see that our net debt came down below CHF1 1,000,000,000 actually CHF41 1,000,000 below versus last year. Our leverage ratio, which is really important for our dividend payment, came in at 0.8 compared to 0.9 in 2017. And yes, we could really because of that made a dividend proposal for today to pay out €3.38 per share, which comes in 2 components, and I'll come to that in the next chart in a little more detail. You see our capital allocation strategy, which actually was changed a year ago and which demonstrates how we come to that €3.38 dividend proposal per share. Actually, it comes in 2 components. The first one is a payout of 40% to 50% of our adjusted net income, which gives the €2.27 per share. But then when we see that we have room in our balance sheet up to a leverage of 1, we can pay a special dividend, a cash dividend, which we're proposing, which is an additional €1.11 or more than €200,000,000 therefore the €3.38 which is 22% more dividend than last year, which was already a record year. That is demonstrated on that chart. When you just look to the very right, you see those 2017, 2018 where Randstad is really trying to unlock value and give value back to investors. And those actually orange yellow parts of it, it's actually the special dividend based on our new capital allocation policy. And last but not least, I'm sure you're interested just to see when payments are happening. April 2, I'd like to highlight on the chart payment of regular cash dividend. And then in the Q4, the beginning of Q4, we are planning to pay out the special dividend. And why is that split? Because we'd like to balance that out with our cash flow delivery in the year. And we have normally a cash outflow in the beginning of the year. And then the second half, we have stronger cash flows and therefore we put that in the Q4. With that, thanks for listening. And as I said, if you want to ask questions, please feel free to do it in touch. Thank you. Thank you, Jack and Henri, for this very extensive presentation. I'd like to move to 2A, which is the report of the Executive Board and the report of the Supervisory Board with respect to the financial year 2018. This would be Pages 19 to 126 in the report. Now if you wish to take the floor for the first time, please state your name and tell us who it is that you're representing. And just as previous years, try to restrict the number of questions, particularly in the first round of questions. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Robert Vreke. We connect you, Public Affairs and Investor Relations. Well, this was a marvelous year. Henry of Unilever hasn't even joined us, and we're already we see that Randstad is the largest company in the world. Fantastic. Mr. Van den Bloeg, you did a marvelous job because Unilever is also the most sustainable company in the world, and Randstad is, in fact, too blue. That's what the entire market says. So if you can also be sustainable and interactive, I'm sure we'll be okay. Now in terms of sustainability, which is a very important point here, the parking garage here is full of fossil fuel cars, no bikes. You probably don't ride your bike to the office. You probably drive an Audi or a BMW. The good news is that the Audi e tron or Jaguar I PACE is being launched into the market, which is a European electric car, and that means that the management of the company can start driving electric cars. And the good news is that if the big boss drives an electric car, the rest of the staff will follow suit. We have more good news because Wout Necker is going to join PON as of tomorrow, and they work in green wheels and Casella Bicycles. So it's a wonderful opportunity for Randstad to start diversifying with respect to transport and to make the company much more sustainable. Randstad used to sponsor Formula 1 race. It might be a good idea to start sponsoring Formula E, which is electrical cars, being the 1st staffing company in the world that would really sponsor sustainable car racing. I think it's a good idea for intermediaries and staff to get a fair wage. In Randstad, in Drachte, they make the same amount of money as in Amsterdam. But here, it's much more expensive to rent a house, or parking costs are much more expensive here in Amsterdam. Perhaps you can take a look at that. And I would want you to purchase as much Apple equipment as possible because this equipment is less sensitive to cybercrime. These are my questions and suggestions. Thank you very much. Very consistent in drawing attention to sustainability, and you always come up with suggestions, Jacques. Formula 1, that's really a question for you. Well, we sponsored Formula 1, first of all, because everybody obviously looks at the cars, but it's a people's business, a Formula 1 team consists of 600 people, 16, 60 people at the racecourse over the weekend. We always find that very impressive. So we always felt very comfortable there. Plus, it also gave us a global brand. And the drawback of Formula E is that there are not very many viewers. And we sponsor because we want to become a well known brand and not because we think it's a sympathetic cause. But I do have a piece of news for you. The next year, 2020, I'm going to be driving the 1st solar car in the world. It's a Dutch car. It's called Lightyear. It's not a car on batteries. It's a solar energy car, 3.5 square meters of solar cells. The CEO is 29 years old. He's a Dutchman. So I'm pretty pleased with that. So we are doing our best. And the issue of the regional job recruitment officer in the north of the country, that's complicated. I mean, if we have to regulate those salaries according to where they live, that's very complicated. Jack? I hope that if the weather is terrible, you do manage to reach the office. Yes, it's not a problem. We'll ride a Gazelle bike. Thank you. Steven Sze is my name. Foundation For Legal Protection of Investors. First of all, I'd like to congratulate you with your performance, but there are two sides to it. The company is doing well. You have nice initiatives, but there are two sides to the coin. If we really start crunching the numbers, Monster, well, we don't know whether that turned out to be too expensive, but the operating income EBIT rather, in percentages, well, EBIT since 2014 has been declining from 16% to 4%, something like that, if I'm not mistaken, from 30% to 6%. Well, I think you should we should be informed in more detail about that because your the operational side of business is efficient, but you do have substantial costs, and your cost management is less flexible. So we would really like to know a bit more about this. What about your organic growth on a day to day basis? Because it seems to be declining. Something else that struck us was that the organic growth declined, particularly in France and in Germany. You already talked about that. But for France, we would like to know what this new law means and what the impact will be because these subsidies, well, they're going to change completely. And then in Germany, you had the goodwill depreciation. For years, I've been telling you to not only take over goodwill. So I think I'll leave it at that for now. The Chairman. Thank you. Who shall I give the floor? Henri? Well, perhaps to come back to profitability, the annual report, Page 200. 2014 in absolute terms, euros 661,000,000 EBITDA is what we reported. A comment off mic from a shareholder of the interpreter count here. Yes, from €600,000,000,000 to €1,000,000,000 but net income, EUR 340,000,000,000 EBITDA percentage, EUR 4.2 to EUR 4.7. But as a CFO, I am the first to admit that there's always room for improvement. That's not the issue. But if we look at the performance also in view of competition, I don't think this performance is bad at all. But as we said, there's always room for improvement. Yes, but that's what always strikes me. In your reports, you keep referring to EBITDA, but we left out the A, and what you get then is EBIT. And we see that in terms of percentages, it's declining. I'm sorry, I can't see it here. Everything is on the increase, but I'll be happy to discuss this bilaterally with you after the meeting. Well, perhaps we can add something. We're not a company that focuses on profit maximization. We are building a company for the future. In 2014, we decided, and I pointed this out in my presentation, to prepare the company for the future. Should we have failed to do so? Should we not have set up our innovation fund? Should we not have acquired Monster? We would have never, been where we are today. We would have had 5 years with much more profit than you see here today. That's true, but we would have been facing a different problem. You see this with competition. They started later, and it's more complicated. They're working on it now, but they're not growing anymore. And so we very deliberately gave up 20, 30 basis points a year to invest in the future. I think it was an excellent decision. At the same time, we are now the most profitable of the top 3 companies globally. Our peers, we own €1,000,000,000 worth more than Adecco. We look at the dividend €3.0 €2.38 So I think it's not bad. Yes, but it's about the future, is it not? And we see that the cash flow, it's great, but investments are lagging behind. What are you basing that on? We're basing that on our calculations that cash flow can increase. Yes, but that's good news, isn't it? And that has everything to do with our strategy. So over the past few years, we conducted a number of acquisitions. If we look back 20 years, every year, we grew by 5%. Half was acquisitions, half was organic growth. And the interesting thing now is, and that's why I showed you the video, we're number 1 in the world in every country. We have a position that we can use to grow further in Japan and the U. S. I'd like to grow more, but we have an organic growth strategy. The interesting thing there is that you get wonderful cash flow generation, which is good news for the shareholders, I would say. Yes, but investments are lagging behind. Yes, well, you just said that. That's what your calculations say, but mine don't say that because we're investing more than our competitors are doing. So we don't have to invest anymore. Good news. And then I have another question about France. Yes, well, the subsidy, the CICE subsidy that we had for a couple of years has been replaced by a new system. Now we don't think that this will have a material effect on an annual basis for our profitability in France. May differ from quarter to quarter because it's a different system, but it's about €100,000,000 positive effect on our cash flow. As you know, the CICE, which is a receivable, of course, we have about €500,000,000 on our balance sheet that will be paid over the next 4 years in cash by the French government. And then we have the new system, which is positive has a positive impact on our cash flow. Well, there was reference to Page 200, 201. You have a 10 year overview there of the annual report. And in terms of your question, we will specify the EBIT next year. Yes, but I would like to understand this a bit better. And there may be something that would be interesting for me to learn more about. So I'd like to talk to you later on. Clear. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. I'm somewhat confused. Are we also going to ask questions that are technical to the annual accounts or no, no, no. I don't want to mix things up. So I'll just focus on the reports. On behalf of the VEB, I'd like to congratulate you with this number one position. But we know from sports that it's easy to get to number one position, in inverted commerce, but to stay number 1, that is really tough. So good luck on in consolidating your number one position. Chairman Mr. Van den Broek in several interviews has pointed out that he does not expect a recession in the short term. That is, if I understood his words correctly, but we are seeing that the economic cycles now are sort of slowing down, reaching their end, say many economists. We also see that the diverse interest structure has been introduced in the U. S. So those are signals that we may want to keep in mind that there may be a recession. How does Mr. Van den Broek and Mr. Hillemer, how do they see the future of Randstad? Are we in for rough times with share price declines? And then my second question is that, on the other hand, you see something quite remarkable. Whichever sector you look at, from hotel and catering, IT, etcetera, companies find it very difficult to find staff. And it's very difficult to fish in a pond that is empty. That's what my father always said. So there is a demand, and companies are looking for staff, but how can Ransa find workers? And I understand that there's a lot of professional training going on, on the job training going on in the metal industry. But are you going to support labor migration? The companies that can't find staff here, are you going to look for staff in Hungary, Bulgaria, and to succumb them here really under the Randstad brand. And another point is, and this is a point that keeps coming back, and that is that you are very much convinced of tech and Touch. You say that, that is your core business, that you are unique in that and you're going to keep that up. On the other hand, we see that platforms are increasing. I'm giving you the example of Yonge Capital with a growth of more than 40%, and they're doing almost everything online. And within 5 years, they reached €1,000,000,000 in revenue in the Netherlands or they want to reach €1,000,000 revenue in the Netherlands. Of course, they're a young start up, and they can be ambitious. But of course, you're working on the digital side of business, but don't you think that Adecco and Manpower that are more traditional businesses, they are being swept away, but don't you think that you're going to get a lot of competition from the platforms such as Microsoft with LinkedIn? I'm thinking, retail, they didn't they weren't that interested in online, but their bankruptcy is happening left, right and center now. So how do you think you can keep up the good work in this environment? Those are my three questions for the first round. While I can't read the TILI, it's not that in interviews I'm saying that there's no recession. There's not going to be a recession. But what you see happening is that when we presented the Q1, you see that there's a growth sideways. So we don't see a tapering off of growth. We said that the growth in January, we knew about that. It was in line with the Q4. So that doesn't mean that we're sort of sliding away. On the one hand, because we're a global company and on the other hand, because the situation wasn't really worsening in France and in Germany. So it seems to be a sort of break, particularly prompted by the automotive sector, but we don't see things picking up, by the way, right now. And you indicated that a recession would lead to share price decline. I think that's interesting. We say that we are not only a growth share, so if something happens in London or Frankfurt, our share will go down. If you look at EBIT or EBITDA, quite apart from Mr. Stevenson's calculation models, they're quite stable because we can cover all the costs, and we hardly have fixed costs. We know what our overheads are. We can respond. So in that sense, we can keep our performance up. And if we look at the fact that we're using less working capital for not growing that 1,000, which means that we have a lot more free cash flow. So with a little bit of growth last year, we became really more profitable, and that's good news. So we're saying to long term investors that we are an attractive share and that share volatility wouldn't be as pronounced. And we are not only vulnerable to economic sentiments. I cannot predict whether or not there'll be a recession in the second half of the year, but we don't really see it happening, and we're telling the market what it is that we're seeing. Is the pond empty? No, it's not empty because there are about 1,000,000 people in the Netherlands that would like to work more or more hours, but there's a mismatch in the labor market. It's got everything to do with the fact that the client is looking for an ideal profile. The ideal profile doesn't exist. Our profession is not to provide the ideal candidate, no, the best candidate with the service in order to make this candidate more productive. And this brings us back to our data strategy. We're the only company in the Netherlands that is capable of showing our client the labor market. That way, the client can take well informed decisions in terms of who he will hire, who he won't hire. Sometimes, it has to take an older employee or 2 younger ones and train them on the job training, and we will help our clients. And the good news is that we can ask a higher fee. The margin, we said this about the 4th quarter, the margin is higher than it was last year in the Netherlands, which is unique because you don't see as much growth in the market. It's got everything to do with this scarcity in the market. So we're ready to face that. There's one question that you might want to ask Yonge Capital is not a platform. Yonge Capital is a staffing company that is pushing a lot digitally and is growing. But I think you should look at costs as compared to revenue. It's not a listed company. But hey, of course, we can grow much faster, but we also have a role to play, a certain responsibility. We want to keep the market healthy, say no to our clients in France. We said no to a client of more than €100,000,000 last year because we feel that our service comes at a price in order to remunerate people, to invest in people and digital investment. A couple of years ago every couple of years, you see this. A couple of years ago, it was USG, and we see the price aggressive actors. I said this in my presentation. We set up the Innovation Fund 5 years ago. 2,500 startups were looked into, and they are not scaling, they're not growing. Platforms without human interaction in our profession simply don't grow at some point. And why is this? And you said so yourself, really. You talked about retail. The sectors that have become de intermediary, the human component was less important for the client, apparently. Retail, hotels and so on and so forth. Why is that? What if you booked the wrong hotel room or you order the wrong book or you're not getting your shoes delivered that you ordered well, life goes on. But if you choose the wrong job through a platform, that's an issue. People change jobs 4 times a year. No, no, no, not 4 times a year, but 4 times in their life. If you have a bad day at the office, never happened to me, but it did have it does happen to some people. You're on the sofa, you see a job on a platform and you call your you don't call your boss the next day to say, hey, I saw a job, so I'm giving I'm handing in my notice. No, you don't want that. You want to talk to a job recruitment officer because you want to know whether you fit in a culture. And that is not something AI can do for you. I was on the stage with the bosses of Google, and they say AI has many, many possibilities, but cannot replace human qualities, which is why we have Tech and Touch. We use technology, and I explained this in detail in my presentation, in order to have the human momentum take place at the right point in time, but most of the clients want a human moment. In order to check and see whether a candidate is who he says he is, LinkedIn well, these profiles at LinkedIn are unchecked. So if you start searching in LinkedIn, you've got to check thousands and thousands of people in order to find a match, and then you've got to find out whether he or she is who he or she says he is or she is. You need an interview for that. And we discovered that over the past 5 years. And so this is our strategy. And we're ahead of Adecco and Manpower, but that really isn't that interesting. The fact that we're number 1, and quite rightly so, the environment has simply changed. And if LinkedIn would acquire Manpower tomorrow, that's when things start to become interesting. Then you get some new movement. We'll have to wait and see, but we're on course. Diane Copeland, you have to I have one question to follow-up on that. You've also got the chat box. Is that a pilot that's being rolled out as well because that is technology based as well as supply and demand driven? Yes, with some technological issues such as matching machines and chatbots. So those are AI driven tools among our equipment. We've got technology driven tools because they develop so quickly. We don't know which one we're going to roll out. For example, once it's been developed in France properly, we may be rolling out different Wendy's worldwide and build one chatbot for the entire world. There's also some good news. There are large customers that Rebecca serves that don't have the answer and would like us to come up with it. So that's good news. Thanks to our investments. We can advise our customers better about how to use technology. Okay, microphone. One more word about labor migration. As for labor migration, we already have thousands of people that we bring from one country to another, and we've been doing that for years. You have the floor. Thank you. Mr. Brunig, I'd like to compliment you on the figures because I always enjoy being at Onset's shareholder. Mr. Jorna already took the words out of my mouth regarding the most important questions. One topic that fascinates me increasingly is do you also mediate jobs for those over 65? As I indicated, there are about 1,000,000 people who would like to keep working longer. We try to work with images because most clients don't ideally look for somebody over 65, and we need to manage those images. And if there's a labor scarcity, we'll try to manage that. But we do it based on data. So we tell clients the profile that you have, there's X people looking for a job and there's Y demand, so you might not find it. But we have an excellent person over 65 that we've known for years, and often you do know people who are over 65 for years, and we can have them on your doorstep tomorrow. And that's often my debate with the government, not only in Netherlands, also in Germany. Flexible work is a good way to try to solve problems, both for the person over 65 who's willing to continue working and for the customer. If you just try if we provide, training guidance, we can make it happen. And I think we're headed in that direction so that the growth options I went to Thyssenkrupp, that's a large German company that they've got all the retired staff in their database. They have an internal staffing agency because those older staff often know about their own technology and those over 65 often have a golden labor mindset rather than the millennials who think only 9% to 5%. So we can certainly tap into those opportunities, but our clients have to be willing to do that as well. Now to the right. [SPEAKER CARLOS GOMES DA SILVA:] Hello, Mr. Chairman. I'm Kaes van der Laest, and I represent the Stiftings Porbert Pensionfrance and Pensionfrance Public Transport and Menses. And in the hasn't Randstad had the sustainability information, verified by an external auditor? The value of this information is becoming of increasing value to investors. Would it make sense having it audited externally? This is the information about sustainability. I'd like to know what Randstad's plans are to have sustainability data verified by an external auditor? Well, I can't really say. That's a good question. I can answer that question. Last year, we started updating our procedure for nonfinancial data. All our OpCos now report a lot of nonfinancial data ranging from training data to health and safety data. And there's a group of people under 25 or over 50 that is addressed as well. We teamed up with a third party to check the procedure. We're working with 6 or 7 large OpCos, and we're trying to see whether we can improve that. After that, we will also engage internally to determine whether we'd like our external auditor to audit that as well. You have the floor. Hello. I'm Mr. Espana for the minutes. Otherwise, she'll ask me what my name is. I have a question about pages 57. Page 5 in the second section about gross profit between 20172018. There's a difference of 5, but we don't have a footnote about why not. Then in the 3rd section, actual, you have gross margin, and there's a difference there as well between 20172018. Those are 2 different blocks. Why don't you have a footnote about that? Because both at EBITDA, at underlying and actual, you do have a footnote about that. So that's one question. And then on to Page 7. You see the candidates placed in jobs. I see the difference between 20172018. The black bar is 0.0, so that's nothing because the leap from 2016 to 2017. I believe that here we're talking about a bad economic situation. Perhaps you could explain it to me because I see a problem that the surplus is no longer present. And why isn't it? Because based on law, increasing or decreasing surplus is equal or tapering off. How do you expect to reverse this trend? Now item 3 is that you are top in terms of staffing, but as for organization, that's unclear because why do people keep sitting at the why do the Board members sit at the table? We weren't able to see the presentation properly. And why do you stand in front here if the screen is behind? It's very unfortunate that you had this layout. Let's start with the first two questions. And you can take the 3rd one. Okay. I'll take Page 7 and Henry can cover Page 5. Well, you're right. If you look at 20172018 and number of people placing jobs, there's not a huge increase, but there's been wage inflation. So revenue is up. So with the low growth to improve growth, we try to sustain our gross margin and curtail costs so that the results do increase as we showed in recent years and we did our very best this year as well. So don't worry about that. I didn't really understand the question about Page 5, but I did. I think that these are simply about rounding off difference at our scale. We're talking about a gross profit of €4,700,000,000 in last year, €4,700,000,000 €800,000,000 remark was inaudible. Why is there no footnote? Because we think that the difference is infinitesimal. If I had to do a footnote for every infinitesimal difference, this annual report would be much longer. But you're entitled to your question. Now your final question about the poor visibility with the Board members seated in front of the presentation, we'll take a good long look at that. As for Henry Schirmer's presentation, we'll talk about that. He did agree not to talk about football today, so we're on track there. All jokes aside, that was a good remark. We'll take a proper look at it. May I ask my question first? Thank you. I'm Nourty Macias. I represent the BDO, the Association of Investors for Sustainable Development. First, I'd like to congratulate you on those fine results, and thank you for the ongoing dialogue over the years. And I'm grateful that we can continue this dialogue in 2019. And I'm also delighted that you even projected my first question on screen concerning the first topic. That's an impressive result because we've been discussing this for several years, and I'm pleased to see that was projected on screen. The BBDO is very pleased with that result. But I do have one request, and I'd really like you to commit on this one, especially now that as the largest HR organization in the world, I think you could contribute significantly to improving disclosure of national salary balances. There were organizations such as Wage Indicator that discloses this, but I think that Randstad would be perfectly positioned to engage in the debate about a living wage and how to improve information about this because we consider this to be a fundamental human right. Philips and SignifAI, they already do this and they've already bridged the gap between minimum wages and living wages. I understand the context. Would you be willing to conduct additional research for 2019 to disclose the difference between national wage balances in the countries where you operate and how this relates to a living wage. I think that would be a fertile grant for additional dialogue. And I understand completely if you wonder how you can do that in all countries where you operate. Perhaps you could select some focused countries. Perhaps you could include America, for example. What's the situation? What are the figures? That was my first question. I have a second question. That's about the SDG Sustainable Development Goals. Thank you for considering 4, 5, 8 and 10 that all align perfectly with what you do. And you have a clear target. You want to improve the active lives of 500,000,000 people. And what matters to us is that in my daily life, I see that SDGs are used as labels in PR communication devices. That's not what they are. It's about creating impact and achieving SDGs by 2,030. My question is whether you're willing to provide more quantitative and qualitative information for 2019 about the true impact of your objectives on the 4 SDGs mentioned in your annual report. You'll have to see this as work in progress because we formulated an objective concerning this 500,000,000 people, and then we're going to substantiate it. So next year, you'll be getting more information about this because it's magnificent to describe what it means for people. Work and I mentored some coworkers the entire year that got a project going from scratch in India to get people with disabilities back on the job market. Now I noticed that our people are incredibly resourceful. They get to work and keep going despite all setbacks. They've now helped they've now worked with 200,000 people and have found jobs for 150,000 or help them set up new companies so that they're in business for themselves. So that's fantastic. Increasingly, we're addressing substance back to living wage. As a global citizen in our business, it's not so relevant because we're present in countries that are challenging, but we're not at the bottom end of the labor market there. And if we are present in Germany, for example, where they didn't have a minimum wage and people would work for €5 an hour, those are not our people. Our people would be getting €9 or €10 and we've got that information. What's unfortunate is that in many cases, the information about the bottom end of the market is not visible to us, even in the Netherlands. As I said in the Focus Journal, you can't even recruit anybody all in for 12 euros It's called platform or freelance, but I don't have those data. It's very difficult for me to compare this with something that's often, exploitation. And that's not the business we're in. Of course, we know a lot about wages in countries, but we don't know anything about that bottom end that you and I are both worried about. But I can do very little about it other than say temporary staffing collective labor agreements. But the government, including the Dutch government, has to be ready to sanction what is not working as well as Germany. I'm not just talking about India and Malawi. I'm talking about closer to home. So let's keep talking about it. We're doing everything we can. You have the floor. [SPEAKER CAROLINA DYBECK HAPPE:] 2nd round. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Now Monster. That was a 25% impairment, equaling 103,000,000 euros I think you expressed concern about the ongoing shrinkage there and that it shrank by double digits in 2018 as well. Now the question is, is this the end? Will we continue downsizing? You said that, that digital leap was necessary. That's clear. And Monster was perfect for that. But when does Monster near its end? You've done enough with measures and new management that's not working. What lies in store for Monster? That's my question. As for the supervisory report, my question is, if we look at your report, there was a sub clause that made us frown, which was that you concluded based on your evaluation that an open dialogue between the 2 boards need to happen and needs to improve to enable the supervisory board members to add value. So the impression you get is that those 2 boards are like cat and mouse, and they're not talking with each other. How can we improve that? And it's good that you want to improve it. How difficult was it? How is it possible? And another remarkable point is that only one of the 2 ladies succeeding Mrs. Gallipo is mentioned in your report. And you mentioned let me see off the top of my head You mentioned Mrs. Karen Fitchuk, but not Mrs. Henderson. And that's odd. I'm talking about Page 109. Didn't you know that at the time? Or did you think you would simply replace 1 person with 1 person? Because I just heard from Mr. Vandenbroek that, that huge portfolio is being divided in half to focus more on the United States. Perhaps I overlooked the name, and then that would be another footnote for Mr. Espana. I have excellent coworkers. And Mr. Winter shows me that if you look at the bottom lines on Page 109, then Rebecca is mentioned. And she's still smiling. Okay. Apparently, I did overlook that. Okay. Perhaps you can answer my question about Monster then. And of course, those 2 boards. Okay. Business is business. We purchased Monster for a few reasons, and we're working on Monster in 3 fields. The first, you could say repairing Monster, but we're not repairing the old Monster. We're creating a new Monster. Monster became great. It's a great brand. It sounds lovely. Doesn't it sound delightful to call it Monster? Monster became great by featuring the newspaper ad online. And over the years, that declined. But that's still the business that's declining. It's traditional. And we're trying to input new business into Monster, people who can build their own social media profile, job market information, a carefully focused search. Customers are progressively less interested in having a subscription for job postings. Clients want to conduct focused searches in the Monster database for the exact profiles. They call it pay per click, and they pay for profiles that align with what their needs or paper candidates, people who knock on your door to apply. And I think that we can do the final triage there. You see that new revenue growing, but you see the old revenue decline. So we're curtailing costs. That's all very well and good. In addition, Monster was underinvested, especially in technology. Also in marketing, We're trying to do this. On the one hand, we're cutting costs. You have to do part of that old business through e commerce, no longer having people physically selling it. So we're doing everything we can to improve the old monster. We still say there's business and revenue, and there is, but the old revenue is decreasing. Next, Monster for OnStar, because we purchased Monster for the profiles. We want to have the largest database in the world for our customers to be able to search for people and to describe job markets based on the profile. And finally, we want to set up an Amazon for candidates where we're constantly communicating with technology and the database. And we're disclosing Monster for the Randstad people. So if you look for professional at Yacht, you'll search the Yacht Veranstad in the Monster databases. In Rebecca's business, if a customer in source site is looking for an IT person, the profiles are loaded straight into the Monster database. That's what we're doing. But we have to invest there as well. So it's a long term mindset. And finally, we want to build new business models between the traditional job board and a company such as ARRIS. And we launched that late last year in America, we called A Better Thing, and it serves drivers. Drivers are difficult to find, and they're always on the roads. So it's difficult to get them into the office in a large country such as the United States. So how do you recruit them? And you also have to, check the paperwork. So we designed an option for drivers to scan their driver's license and we check with the Department of Motor Vehicles that they don't have any moving violations. So the paperwork is okay. And then they can schedule an interview with a recruiter for one of our clients. It is a new business model that we launched in 4 U. S. Cities in late November. It's too early to tell what that will bring, but it's on track. In addition, we told the market and you that here Monster is part of global businesses. So we're going to integrate that reporting. Part of the old revenue will disappear. New revenue will come on board, but it's been an uphill battle. And it's also been a good lesson for us because if you want to get to number 1, staying number 1 is often very challenging. And if everything was, going perfectly, I wouldn't have any work either. I hope you'll have a lot of work. Thank you. Now you had a question about the Supervisory Board report. You know that we have 3 roles: Supervisory, our role as Employer of the Executive Board, and then a role, to serve the firm and finally, being the feedback and adviser. And we've reviewed our own performance very seriously in recent years, and we've asked the Executive Board for input and feedback. We don't quite change 360 degrees, although I can't rule that out. So you have to be very critical of your own performance. You're asking all kinds of questions about disruption. Yes, disruption is taking place in a rapidly changing world. So, you'll have to keep taking critical view of how the executive board is doing and how the supervisory board is doing and whether we're making the most of each other and benefiting as much as we can. Now there are long articles about how are those boards doing. There's always room for improvement. To give you an example, early this morning, 2 supervisory board and 2 executive board members sat down with a staffing director to continue talking about the digital item through a deep dive. And that exemplifies how we try to combine the experience of 1 and the experience of others. So that matches the ambition of this company, so that we can be reasonably critical of ourselves. And I support that since we're here together. It does improve our interactions. You asked whether we were interacting fruitfully. This is a self critical supervisory board that wants to know how we can add more to the executive board once a year we schedule a strategy session, and we've got teams working on all kinds of important fields in the company, and it's all going smoothly. What might be nice for Randstad is that you're going to devise an anti cyclical approach and set aside a lot of money for the next cycle. Because even if you're in a recession, you have to keep doing business as usual. And if 1.5 years or 2 years you are not doing well, you need a lot of reserves to communicate because anybody who communicates a lot then will earn the most and emerge intact from the recession. I said a lot I said there were a lot of labor market shortages. Randstad could launch Randstad Lifetime Employment so that people attending vocational schools and universities should be tracked throughout their careers. That's very easy. We also have people with practical training. Henry Schirmer is from Germany, where we have the best craftsmen. If you were to bring some of them to the Netherlands, then as coaches and mentors, you could make a very high profit in the Netherlands that way. I'm somebody who had a wonderful secondment for Randstad. I became Head of Communication for ING International to handle communication in 50 countries, and I never heard from Randstad again. 25 years ago, my wife was a manager at Randstad. She wasn't allowed to work part time, so she took up different work. She never heard from Randstad again. 25 years later, she returned to Randstad. That's brilliant because it's difficult to find a job when you're over 45. She left because Tempo team, lost a tender to Randstad, which was able to offer a far lower profit margin and never heard anything again from them. So stay in touch with all your staffers throughout their careers because it's about the relationship and not the transaction. Next, European platforms. The large global platforms are exclusively Chinese and American. I think it would be a good idea for Randstad and other parties to initiate large European platforms so that people earn a decent income and a decent pension. And all those social premiums will be paid again because all those antisocial platforms such as Uber and the like, we don't want those here in Europe. Thank you. Your second point, I think you made that same point 2 years ago about the personal living wage. That's why I'm delighted to see you here. But Randstad has yet to call me. We'll take this on board. Jacques, could you please focus on points 13, the first and the third point? Okay. We're anti cyclical in that we've been investing in the future for 5 years, as I just mentioned in responding to another country, we could have earned a lot more, but we invested in a digital future. I agree entirely with you. People connect to us once. It was not humanly possible to get in touch with people at the perfect time. Technology will help us there. What bothers me is if somebody, is called with an announcement that they'll be getting a call, and it's difficult to explain that. It could happen. And it's also based on your own initiative. Couldn't you have called us if you were looking for work? Okay. Bringing Germans to the Netherlands, unemployment is even lower in Germany than in the Netherlands. I agree that the apprentice system in Germany is excellent, but there are also tremendous shortages in Germany. So I agree with you about the system. As for European platforms, I agree with you, we don't have a European investment environment. We in our investment fund, we see a lot of promising European startups leaving for the United States. That's not a good thing. So we're advocating European investments in digital and artificial intelligence. So we couldn't agree with each other more. Okay, thank you. Okay, one more question. And then I propose that we move on to 2B. Mr. Stephens upfront. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Stevens from the SRB. As for Monster, that was mentioned a few times already. And you associated with the Monster Randstad, but we believe that you overpaid for that. That's the only possible conclusion. And I understand that it acquired it was a technological acquisition. At a certain point, in our view, Monster is no longer adding value. So if when you don't need it, why don't you just sell it? And then you could perhaps recoup some of what you overpaid, Jacques. I think I already answered all strategic questions about Monster. We're happy we purchased it. We believe it has a great many profiles. Monster remains the 2nd most valued job board in the U. S. So that certainly pays off the investment, and it's going to work out. Yes, but you just said about corporate human capital. Young Capital. [SPEAKER UNIDENTIFIED COMPANY REPRESENTATIVE:] Or what? You just if you're talking about young capital, you said you relate that to Monster. So then you wouldn't need Monster. Well, that's not what I said. If you place all brands on the Monster platform, then you don't need Monster anymore. Perhaps we should schedule a strategic advice session. I think we're on track and that we should continue this way. So that's the way it is, but you have a good point. We should have taken an impairment. So that relates to the assessment about its value. On the other hand, we're proud of this very strong brand. And in the years ahead, we'll need to prove that it continues to add value. Now if this was the final question in this round, then I propose moving on to agenda item 2B. I apologize. That's okay. I didn't raise my hand until now. I'm Robert John von Hoist. I represent myself. I'm a proud employee at this firm. In early November, I ate a delicious cake on that morning. What I'm curious about, Jacques, what I'd like to know, there's a lot of debate about introducing a quota for women in top management positions and diversity in general. That's an excellent HR issue. And I'm curious what you have to say about this to wrap up this round of questions. Excellent. Okay. An interview was published with my wife in the Dutch Financial Daily a few weeks ago. My wife is a tax consultant and was a partner for the first time in 80 years. So we often talk about those glass ceilings. Randstad has signed the charter about getting to the top, where companies cultivate workforce diversity. I'm talking about gender diversity now. It's called women and men. We have about 50% women in management positions globally, and that's not really enough because we're talking about sixty-forty from the level of job recruitment officers. So we are losing some people. But in the Netherlands, we score only 38%. That's relatively low. And that's because of Dutch society, Dutch women often need to explain why they're pursuing a career. Sometimes they have to explain it to their husband or their parents or their in laws or their girlfriends. I'm working very hard at that. I was also an instructor at the talent to the top. So we do convey diversity at Randstad, and we're working on it. And I'm delighted that we although we're losing Linda on the Executive Board, we're bringing in 2 women members. So it takes a lot of work. And we also tried to keep all of our women co workers in the loop. And if they went to leave, I asked them to let me know. Agenda item 2b account for the implementation of the remuneration policy 2018. Information on our remuneration policy, you can find in the annual report, Pages 115 through 120. Who would like to ask a question on this subject? Yes. Thank you, Chairman. Isn't it remarkable that an employee should call the big boss of Randstad Jacques? To me, it's still Mr. Van den Broek, but it says something about the culture in Randstad. And I think it's wonderful to see this. Chairman, remuneration. Page 117. Actually, you see that only 20% is paid out of the financial targets, which counts for 75% in the short term incentive. We find this on Page 117. Can you perhaps indicate because the short term incentive drops from £670,000,000 for Mr. Van de Broek Jacques, for those who know him well, to 370. So after this very eloquent presentation, we think he deserves more. Could you point out which KPI has particularly caused this drop in his short term incentive? Well, this is a mix of KPIs, says the Chairman. On the one hand, you have the target, and I'm sure you're familiar with this company's ambition. And then throughout the targets, we're more ambitious than what happened in actual fact. So historically speaking, this is quite a low score in years in which an incredible amount of things have happened and it's part of the system. Question, Page 117 is particularly about the financial elements. Those targets really lead to a low score. So I would imagine that the other targets, the non financial targets, that he did well there. But which financials? Because I couldn't really find this. We just saw the numbers. Everything went up. So either you raised the bar too high or the scores were poor. Well, we raised the bar. You're used to us doing that. In any case, that's what we've done. And Annette, could you perhaps In the report, you'll read that we have 3 kinds of financial targets: revenue, EBITDA margin and then DSAs. For all three targets, we had very ambitious targets. None of these three targets have been achieved to the extent that what we expected, particularly the last quarter, didn't develop as we had hoped it would. So also for reasons of confidentiality and competitive information, we don't want to zoom into the individual targets, but we do see an equal spread across the targets. Question, but that was no reason to use your discretionary powers because if the economy collapses, of course, you can say, we but this is not his fault, not the CEO's fault. In the new remuneration policy, the supervisory board has very little discretionary power in this respect. So let me put it this way. We tried to make the best of it, but as contrary to the previous remuneration system, the discretionary powers also because certain investors don't really like discretionary powers, clearly, the incentive declined. Well, it's a strange thing to insist on. I mean, everybody yes, I don't dare to look to my right. I don't think it's a very sensible thing to do, says thing to do, says the Chairman. Are there any other questions? If not, we can proceed to agenda item 2C, which is a proposal to adopt the financial statements 2018. You'll find them on Pages 127 through 192, the annual report, and this has been explained in detail. First, I would like to give the floor to the Chairman of the Audit Committee, Frank Olier, so that he can say a few words about the work of the Audit Committee in 2018 and the cooperation with the auditor. And subsequently, I shall give the floor to Bas Sadat of Deloitte. Frank? As Chairman of the Audit Committee, I'm looking back on a year in which many issues were discussed. Most meetings of the Audit Committee took place prior to the publication of quarterly results. Prior to the Audit Committee meetings, I had personal meetings with the CFO, Directors of Global Control, Global Financial Reporting and Global Business Risk and Audit. And the Audit Committee meetings themselves were attended by the CEO, CFO and the external auditor and also these Managing Directors. The focus of the meetings was, therefore, on the financial reports but also a number of other matters such as tax issues, legal issues, funding, data protection and information protection, cyber security as we call it, and the new European legislation on GDPR and IT also in general terms was also a subject of these meetings. These meetings also discussed the audit plan of the external auditor and the GBR and A department. And we're also approved. And Henry also mentioned it, the dividend for the financial year 2018 was discussed, which was in line with dividend policy, which was approved in 2018. And the net debt EBITDA ratio of lower than 1 would lead to an extra cash dividend up to the level of a ratio of 1. And also, new developments in the field of IFRS were discussed in the audit committee. The most important item was a new guideline, which becomes mandatory as per the start of the financial year 2019 concerning the accounting of lease obligations and new standards with respect to financial instruments and accounting of revenue have not had a material impact and have been implemented as per January 1, 2018. As usual, we paid attention to further improvement of internal controls and the control environment. Each quarter, the Audit Committee discusses the results and the findings of the external auditor, but also the quarterly report of the Department Global Business Risk and Audit in 2018. The GBR and A departments further strengthened by means of training and by hiring IT audit specialists. Management letters of the external auditors were discussed and do not contain any material findings. Jacques already said this, the turn at the top of the organization is good. Core values, the code of conduct, the whistleblower's regulation are very important elements in this respect. The strategic repositioning of the company leads to an open it was clearly also mentioned by the gentleman at the back of the room, leads to an open and clearly robust dialogue between all the layers of the organization in which targets and core values are leading. Randstad aims to improve the internal control in different country organizations every year and bring it to a higher level. Each 6 months, the management sets up a risk register of all local companies and also carries out a control self assessment. The risk and audit function will also test the quality and control in the different operational companies and will also make a comparison or benchmark the outcomes of internal audits and the management self assessments. And the results are discussed every 6 months in the Executive Board and Audit Committee. And also, the risk appetite of the company was discussed in the Executive Board and the Audit Committee, which by means of which, we are improving on internal control systems and measures. Further digitization of business models and operating processes are further supported by a focus on IT control, particularly over the next few years and also in 2018. Over the past few months in 2018, for data protection, information, security and IT general controls, we started important programs. And in the course of 2019, these programs will be further rolled out. These programs have a very strong IT component, will lead to a further update of the key control framework. The key control framework reflects the measures in which of the internal control with respect to the most important risk of operational and financial business processes. The Global Business Risk and Audit Department monitors the effectiveness and quality of internal control progress. There are 3 important aspects that were also discussed. A number of them have also been reviewed by Henry and Jacques. The first one, obviously, was the valuation of goodwill, and that's on the basis of the annual goodwill depreciation test, the so called impairment test. On the basis of current insights and estimates, this has led to a depreciation of goodwill and also other assets in total of €103,000,000 The second one was the valuation of the position concerning deferred taxes. It was also mentioned and it also led to a one off increase of the tax asset of CHF 86,000,000 which was recognized in the item taxes in the profit and loss account 2018. Last but not least, fraud risks and number of fraud cases, which fortunately did not lead to any material items for Larenstad at all. With that, I'd like to give the floor to our external auditor, Mr. Bas Savard of Deloitte Auditors. I shall try not to stand right in front of the screen of the slides, but there's nothing on the screen. Oh, yes, there is. My name is Bas Savert of Deloitte. This is our 4th year as Deloitte auditors for Randstad and my 2nd year personally, I'm going to give you a brief explanation of the order that we carried out, and I should be following a slide. You may not be able to read it, but I'm just going to highlight the most important points here. We audited the financial statements. And on 11th of February, we issued our unqualified opinion. And the financial statements have been included in the annual report, and you'll find our opinion on Page 193 and the following pages. You may well have read it. You will see that in accordance with the customary rules. We focus on a number of issues, core issues, core items of our orders, and I'll be discussing that in a moment. And we also included additional information in the annual report. We also look at this other information. We look at the annual report and other information. And according to the auditing standards, it is our responsibility to determine whether this information is in line with the financial statements and whether legal information has been included. And we've conducted such a check, and you'll find further information in the annual report. Our communication with the Audit Committee, Mr. Doerier, has told us a bit about this. And every quarter, we meet with the Audit Committee and with the Executive Board. We look at the quarters not only not really in a formal as a formal responsibility, but we look at that also to be able to plan our work as best as possible for the rest of the year and also to highlight any possible risks. And during the quarters, we discussed a number of important documents: the audit plan in April management in December and subsequently just before we sign off the annual report. In the audit plan, we determine materiality and also risk analysis. You see in the slide that it amounts to €50,000,000 in materiality, which is in line with last year, and we determined materiality based on profit before tax, which is customary for listed companies. And for the countries, well, in general, we lower use a lower materiality. Countries report to us with a certain degree of materiality a maximum of €30,000,000 And in many cases, work is carried out with it at a lower level because of statutory audit obligations. Larger countries are audited by Deloitte, and there are a number of other countries which are audited by BDO. I'll refer to that. And despite the fact that these are not the most important components, every year, we have talks with BDO about their scope and also on a rotational basis, we carry out visits to the businesses that are audited by BDO. In this case, it was Portugal. Then in the audit plan, we also determine the scope, and scope leads to 14 group companies or subgroups that we submit subject to a full audit and full clearances issued for group purposes and that is reported to us. With that scope, we cover about 89% of revenues, which is a very broad coverage if you look at the work that we do. Now reportable matters. The key ordered matters are revenue, goodwill and tax. And we include this in our opinion. Because of the introduction of IFRS 15 and also because we find that revenue is a very important element and it is a risk that is perceived as a presumed risk in the ISAs. That is why we pay a lot of attention to accounting of revenue and different kinds of revenue in terms of staffing business that is, of course, a major chunk, but there are also other kinds of revenues for which we require a different approach, and we also look at that or the local team whether the local teams are carrying this out in a thorough way. So that's a matter that we pay attention to. IFRS 15 did not have a big impact, as just explained by the Chairman of the Orders Committee. Nonetheless, we do look at this, and the same applies to other standards. And for taxes, since taxes require estimates and the recoverability of your deferred taxes, we pay attention to that. And this year, taxes also had an impact on the effective tax rate, particularly the valuation of losses that had not been valued before. And so we paid attention to that. And then by way of conclusion, the last point that I would like to cover is goodwill. DKK 3,000,000,000 on the balance sheet always requires our attention. You know that people often say that goodwill constitutes a standard risk for accountants, and usually, you see this in the opinion. On the one hand, that is indeed true because estimates are used to a great extent in order to assess goodwill, but this year we've determined an impairment of an impairment which also requires us to take a careful look at the process. So this is a core item. Besides the core issues, there are other issues that we discussed with the Executive Board and the Orders Committee, and this would be estimates, one offs and all sorts of other things that have not led to a change in our findings. I think that I could leave it at that. So I would now like to give you the possibility to ask questions concerning the audit, questions to me, other questions to the audit committee or the executive board. Now questions about the financial statements and the auditors' opinion. I'm going to start at the back. Chairman, my name is Spania for the minutes. In the other question I asked, you said we said that you were standing in front of the screen. Well, it takes time for you to change your policies. Just now reporting matters, you are sitting right in front of it. I can't see it. I mean, how can that be? I mean, you've got lots of places where you could put the chairs in a different direction so that we could have seen the screen. I mean, you could have been over there. The auditor, what about the 16th guideline and the implementation thereof? What is the impact thereof? What is your outlook? IFRS 16 will come into force next year. In 2018, we were involved in order to give an explanation on the expected impact of the leasing standard. So our involvement in IFRS 16 is to understand how the company has assessed that impact, and we have a process for that, a very thorough process. And in fact, the company itself could explain that, but our responsibility is reflected in this explanation. We explain what the impact is of the standard and the standard will be reflected this year in 2019 in the numbers. But of course, we take a look at it because they're numbers and the explanation is part of the financial statements. So So obviously, we are in full application of it, and we promised in our quarter 4 results presentation that we will go back on time to the markets to give a bit more insight of what the implication will be. So just within the next couple of days, we will just inform the markets about it. But don't hold your breath. There's nothing material in there, but we just want all kind of players to have it at the same time, but there's no material impact on our result. But I think there's a much better thing than just kind of getting out here and then have a misbalance in information. Yes. Duncan Forschiet, Jorna Feve. Forschiet, over to Jarek. Jorna, VEB. Chairman. About the financial statements, first question and then two questions for the auditor. The DSO, we just talked about that, is increasing and it's costing Randstad a lot of money. Last year, Mr. Van der Kraatz pointed out that the company would do its utmost to reduce the DSOs. It has something to do with the mix of production. Is that again the cause of an increase in DSO days or did your measures fail to reduce DSOs? It's increasing 53.2 to 53.9 days. It's not a lot, but nonetheless. Another question, publicity and marketing expenses will go down to 188. You don't see that very often. But if you're satisfied with the growth now, why would you publish more advertisements and you also withdrew from Formula 1 sponsorships? So that will save you a lot of money. That's what I think. And a third question is a question that keeps cropping up. You still are intent on applying variable interest in these times and economists say that the interest rates are not going to increase. Don't you think it would be interesting to agree on a long term interest rate with the banks? I don't know whether you have those possibilities, but you could consider it. And the 2 questions for the auditor, the auditor can answer those questions later on. Or shall I ask them now or shall I wait? No, I see that the fee is increasing by 25%, EUR 3,200,000 to EUR 4,000,000 which is 25%. Now it could well be that there is a surcharge because of shortages because it's very difficult to find good auditors nowadays. So well, I don't know. And on a more serious turn, goodwill. I mean, you talked about that last year. Perhaps you thought you didn't have to take an impairment. And now we're faced with 25% on Monster. Don't you think as an auditor, don't you think that last year perhaps you took the estimates of the company a bit too lightly? Let us start with Henry. With the DSO. Indeed, there is always mix at play, but it's not just the geographical mix, but it's also we have overproportionate growth with bigger companies, which are very professionally managed from procurement function. So there will be continuous pressure on DSO, and we will do everything to work against it. But I would not be too surprised if that will go up also in the future going forward. But as I said, there's 2 components in DSO. 1 is kind of the structural pricing and the payment terms, but there's also overdues. And there's also homework for us to do to kind of keep our overdues in check. And that just requires really daily management and discipline. But in general, there's a structural pressure on there. Second one, yes, our marketing spend is going down. It comes mainly from 2 things: our stepping out of the Formula 1, but also less marketing spend on Monster because we are concentrating in getting the service provision right along the lines of it doesn't make huge sense to get people through the door and it's not sticking. And we also have shifted the portfolio or the spend into user experience. So what do you experience when you come through what I call a digital door? And there is also a sort of marketing spend that is being booked under IT. The third one, financing. You're obviously right. We're constantly looking at our financing structure. We feel very comfortable with it. We're doing stress tests in a very, very disciplined way. And so far, it is serving us well. We're also very much aware that if you ever wanted to make that shift, you better do it when the sun is shining, but we're taking it really into account. And we have facilities there and we are not let me put it positively, so as financing is concerned, we are prudent plus prudent plus prudent. So we are really but at the same time, we don't want to spend too much time on interest rates. There were 2 for you maybe. I can answer those questions. I'll speak Dutch. Our fees. Well, if only this was representative for the increase in fees in the Netherlands, not the case. And we do not present adjusted audit fees. They are what they are. And the main impact is that in the past, we had elements that we did not audit as Deloitte and elements that we are now auditing, and that will happen this year as well. There'll be a changeover from BDO to Deloitte, which means that in our explanation, we show that there's an increase in work. But unfortunately, it's not an increase in my fee. A comment off mic. Interpreter can't hear. The answer to the question is no. What I'm saying is that we have to present the Deloitte fees and not the BDO fees. And so that means that the fees invoiced by other network companies, those are BDO fees and not Deloitte fees. Once again a question off mic. So what we see in the table are the Deloitte fees, not the BDO fees. So that doesn't have an impact on the Netherlands, and that is because of the acquisitions of 2, 3 years Perhaps by way of explanation, Deloitte has a contract with Randstad and charges a fixed fee, which is subject to an inflation adjustment. You'll find this in the explanation. And as Mr. Saver just said, there are also companies that were acquired by Randstad and audited in the subsequent year by Deloitte, and that has an increasing effect. And then of course, there are always one offs such as new IFRS and things like that. And second question with respect to goodwill. Well, this is a question of conscious, but I'll be happy to discuss it. I would say that assessing goodwill is an assessment of future cash flows by definition. It is a complicated process. What we do is we assess whether the estimates made by management, whether we consider them to be reasonable. Now we use specialists for that, and also management uses specialists in drafting the impairment models. Last year, we explained for the financial statements 2017 that for cash generating units, there is a possibility there can be a greater sensitivity for an impairment. So that would mean that some units have a lot of headroom, others have less headroom. So if you have less headroom, how can it be that if your ultimate if the result deviates from your estimate, how can you make sure that you don't end up in an impairment situation? For Monster, This is a business that was acquired recently in the 1st few years, particularly when you're integrating the company. It's very difficult to predict what the future will provide you with. And so you make an estimate, and at some point, management has to act, and that action was taken in 2018. In the Netherlands, we have Rolf Hammers and Chuck van den Broek. Van den Broek are 2 championships. Rolf Hammers had a blooper with €800,000,000 in losses. And last year, Randstad delivered a stellar performance. And relatively speaking, both gentlemen earned far below what their international performance would have indicated. So I'd like the auditor to tell me about the benchmarking. And my sense is also that Mr. Vande Plroupp may not earn that much more than the average Randstad employee. I'm curious about that. As for spending on marketing, I would like Randstad to be ubiquitous globally, for example, in the Champions League during the Olympics and during the Olympics. So you should spend far more on marketing because that delivers a magnificent return. For example, Heineken spends €60,000,000 on the latest James Bond film, which is why Heineken keeps growing. Perhaps that would be a nice example for Randstad to follow. Finally, also about marketing. Advertising in dailies and the quality of journalism would benefit you? So perhaps you could allocate funding for traditional Dutch dailies. That might be a good idea. Okay. We've wrapped up the section on remuneration, but I would like to talk about it. We've described our peer groups and our benchmarks. We review them regularly. And Annette Aras just said how we consider the variable section and how we deal with it mathematically. I'm not pleased to do this, but you've also seen that there was no increase in the fixed remuneration of the CEO. And that was explicitly stated by Schack at his desire. So whereas elsewhere, we talk about carefully tuned social antennas and, you can always debate about what's socially desirable. I thought that was loud and clear. Jacques, would take the other questions? Yes, we constantly seek, sponsoring opportunities, but we're starting to realize that simply sticking a label on is no longer of this day and age. So we're trying to see how we can build a global brand through digital means. And Joanna Erwin, our CMO, is with us here, and we have talked with her at length about that. So I expect more news for you next year, but I don't expect this to be a traditional way of sponsoring advertising and dailies that really won't get you anywhere anymore. We've abandoned that. All belief in building a very strong brand, and that is extremely important for our business, for sure. I have one more question. In the front, Mr. Stephaneza. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Mr. Stephaneza from the SRB. Actually, I have two questions concerning fraud. I didn't notice much about that in the auditor's report. And I understood that you consulted lawyers to have a good look at that. As for Monster, much has already been said, and that's the reason for the huge impairment. What we're wondering is whether that's the end. Have we done everything? Or what about the new accounting rules? Fraud, is that good news? Well, if we don't write a long book about that, of course, there's also social debate about how much we'll do to report exactly all our actions relating to fraud. I believe that in 2018, at other companies listed on the stock exchange, we've seen some additional explanation about responsibilities on the one hand, indicating what we do, but on the other hand, stating what we don't do. In our present model, as we agreed with our NBA Professional Association and explained to most of our clients our duties do relate to fraud. So the fact that we did not report anything in particular means that we didn't identify anything substantial. But we take several steps such as audit procedures that are intended to trace fraud, but there are inherent cases that remain equally applicable. And we're in excellent contact with our forensic counterparts at Deloitte. That's part of Risk Services. And they support teams of auditors at their request. And they also provide general support to the audit approach concerning fraud and irregularities. The second point relating to goodwill is that the fact remains both for Monster and for other OpCos that we paid goodwill for. You rely on estimates of cash flow in the years ahead and the extent to which such cash flow may be achieved. I cannot guarantee that this is the last impairment. I can't say that this is the end of it. I do ascertain that we checked as at end 2018 when we performed the test that the assumptions by management were reasonable. We reviewed that, and that's what our conclusion addresses. I'm remembering now that all goodwill of Monster has been impaired. Yes, for Monster specifically, all the goodwill has been impaired. So that's off the books. Then I propose, if there are no more questions, that we adopt the financial statements for 2018. I'm going to hand you over to Gela Mirima to walk you through the voting procedure. 860 shareholders of which you jointly represent 222,750,617,17 shares, including €5,200,000 preference B and €50,130,350 preference C shares. Altogether, you can cast 156,000,000,006,000,000,006,000,000 5 votes, of which 3,600,000 on B shares and 5,600,000 on C shares, and that adds up to 38.8 percent of the total share capital. And we're about to vote. Hopefully, you have your voting handsets and they should work if you insert your voting card. If they don't work, please raise your hand and the hostess will be with you to assist. Vote 1 to vote in favor of the proposal. Vote 2 to vote against the proposal. And vote 3 to abstain from the vote. If you do not make a selection, your vote will not be counted. And after a few moments, you'll see the result of the vote on screen. Now we're going to vote on Agenda Item 2C, which is the proposal to adopt the financial statements for the 2018 financial year. The vote is now open. Has everybody voted? Then I'm closing the vote and we'll project the results on the screen and the proposal has been adopted with 99.99 percent of the votes cast in favor. Wout, you have the floor again. Regarding agenda item 2C, which is the proposal to adopt the financial statements. We just covered that. Yes, we just covered that. Now on to Agenda Item 2D, the explanation of the policy on reserves and dividends. Henry Schirmer has already explained this point. Are there any questions about dividend policy? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Jorna from the VEB. I have two questions. Mr. Van den Broek basically indicated that he sees Randstad more as a value share than a growth share. I also read that 10 times profits is, in his view, rather a low assessment of the value. Have you considered using the additional dividend to repurchase shares if they're so if they're priced so low, they might add value? So I would say use it to repurchase shares. And I understand that you hope to be regarded as a value share through the dividend, which might stabilize the Iran stock share price. But I don't think you've accomplished that yet if I look at the huge fluctuations recently. Well, as you know, I'm not in charge of share prices. We're trying to show people the corporate profile, and that's dynamic. And that's what many investors are noticing is that we're a very stable company with very stable cash flow. And thanks to our business model, the growth is less because of lower working capital, but we're generating far more cash, thanks to our global presence. That's one second is that we're a traditional staffing company, so that's usually 10x profit. Dated companies are valued at 20x profit. And we're rum catching up. It's up to shareholders to purchase and sell shares. Of course, in reality, there's a very long list of companies that hold on to our shares for 2 to 3 months, so it's difficult to identify strategy. What we care about is for long term shareholders, we want to explain the value of Fransa shares to them. I can't impact the volatility of shares, but 5% fluctuation in a day such as last week is odd and doesn't really relate to our companies. So we can represent ourselves as a company as for repurchasing shares. There are a few reasons why for the time being, we're not doing it. We aren't saying we'll never do it, but we're not such a liquid share. It sounds contradictory. We're a fairly large holding and we still have our founder. For the size company that we are, relatively few shares are negotiable. Of course, repurchasing would exacerbate that problem. So we've decided that this year, given that the policy is 2 years old, we don't want to change too quickly. But we're considering it, but that's the policy for this year. You have the floor. I agree entirely with Mr. Jorna. Randstad can grow very rapidly, but it does mean that you need to market away. And I mentioned the Champions League and the Olympics, and then you're a global Champions League player and you need to do a lot of sound marketing. You need to work hard on marketing. This is also an excellent organization with wonderful objectives that treats people well. So globally, you can show that Randstad is exemplary. So I'm a strong supporter of boosting the marketing budget for the okay, you can sponsor the Champions League for €10,000,000 or €20,000,000 and that's simply a drop in the bucket for Randstad. I think you made your point and both gentlemen have replied. Thank you. If there are no additional questions, that takes us to the proposal to determine the regular dividend. This topic has already been explained at length as well. The dividend payment for preference shares B and C amounts to €12,600,000 In keeping with our adjusted dividend policy, the proposal is to pay a regular dividend on the ordinary shares amounting to CHF2.27 per ordinary share in cash, and this equals the maximum payout of 50%. Are there any questions about that? Who would like the floor? Okay. I'll hand you over to Jelle. If you choose 1, you vote in favor of the proposal 2 votes to vote against the proposal 3 to abstain. And you may now cast your vote. The vote is closed and the results will appear projected on the screen. And the proposal has been adopted with 100 percent of the votes cast in favor. Okay. I find that the proposal has been adopted. Next, the second portion of the total dividend on 2018. And 2 F, there's a proposal to determine a special dividend. This topic has been explained at length. In addition to the regular dividend, it's proposed that a special dividend be paid per ordinary share equaling €1.11 in cash. The Executive Board intends for this payment to take place in October 2019. The exact date will be published on the corporate website. Are there any questions? If not, then I'll hand you over to Jeva. You're familiar with the options. Please cast your vote. The vote is closed, and you'll see the result projected on the screen. And the proposal has been adopted with 99 point 8 6 percent of the votes cast in favor. Next, Agenda Item 3A, discharging the executive board members from liability for management. I propose the following discharge discussion. The general meeting of shareholders shall discharge the executive board members for their management in the 2018 financial year. To the extent it is clear from the financial statements, the annual report and the other documents presented to the general meeting of shareholders and the explanations delivered at this meeting. Are there any questions? Gela, Please cast your vote. The vote is now closed and the results will be projected on the screen and the proposal has been adopted with 99.88 percent of the votes cast in favor. Now 3b, granting discharge to the supervisory Board members for their supervision of the executive Board members. I propose the following discharge resolution. The General Meeting of Shareholders shall discharge the supervisory Board members for their supervision of the management carried out in the 2018 financial year to the extent it's clear from the financial statements, the annual report and the other documents presented to the general meeting and the explanations provided at this meeting. Are there any questions? If not, Jelle, please cast your vote. And slide of the standing. The vote is closed. And on the screen, you will see that the proposal has been inductive with 99 point 88% of the votes cast in favor. Before we move on to agenda item 4, I'd like to say a few words to Linda Gallipo. Linda, you joined in 1995, which was over 23 years ago. He joined Randstad as the District Manager in Memphis. Randstad in the United States was relatively small, comprising only 80 branches in the United States. In 1997, you moved to Canada where you were born, and you set up Randstad Canada from scratch. When you returned to the United States over 10 years later, the revenue equaled CAD150 1,000,000 in 2008. You became President of Fransa's Staffing Operations in the United States. In 2012, you were appointed Executive Board Member and were entrusted with the responsibility for all business in the United in North America. You were involved in several very important acquisitions such as SFN, RISE Smart and Monster, which were important not only in North America but globally. They've been very important for it on set. North America is our largest region, as Jacques mentioned, with above average profitability and a strong team of leaders. Now it's time for you to enter a new stage in your career. We wish you all the very best and great wisdom. And on behalf of the Supervisory Board, I'm pleased to thank you for your extended involvement with Randstad and for everything that you have done for Randstad. Thank you, Linda. I'm sure you'll understand that we'll have a lengthy farewell for Linda this evening, but we feel very fortunate that we have found good successors. As Jacques mentioned, we've even had some questions about them. That takes us to Agenda Item 4A, which is the proposal to appoint Rebecca Henderson to the Executive Board. The explanation and the curriculum vitae of Rebecca are in the agenda. Rebecca Henderson joined Randstad in 2012 when SFN was acquired by Linde. Would Rebecca please rise and introduce herself to you? Page 109. And I have spent the last year last 8 years at Randstad after the SFN acquisition, really integrating source rights RPO and MSP business and expanding that globally. And we've learned a lot about the needs of our global customers over that time. So I really look forward spending the rest of my next 4 years and beyond continuing to do that and expanding that for all of our global customers amongst all of our global businesses. So Outplacement and Monster, the continuation of growth for Source Right and then helping our global customers take advantage of those value propositions. I also am passionate about women's issues and diversity in general, and I want to continue to champion those efforts as well for the company. Thank you. Thank you. I'm not going to repeat all of this, but the highlights of her agreement align with the remuneration policy and to appear in the agenda. We propose appointing her for a first 4 year term. Are there any questions? No? Thank you. Option 1 is to vote in favor of appointing Rebecca Henderson. Option 2 is to vote against and choose option 3 to vote again to abstain from the vote. Please cast your vote. The vote is closed. On the screen, you see that the proposal has been adopted with 99.98% of the votes cast in favor. And now we have a contest. That takes us to Agenda Item 4B, which is the proposal to appoint Karen Fitchuk as member of the Executive Board. The explanatory notes and curriculum V type appear in the agenda. Karen Fichuk has 25 years of experience with commercial and functional supervisory positions at the Nielsen company. And we Dutch still remember that company that organization, prioritized organization, customer focus and human development. Heiko Randstad. Karen is present here and is pleased to introduce herself. I'm Karen Fishhoek, and I'm still very excited to be here. It's been a long wait, but I look forward to telling you a little bit about myself. So I've spent the last 25 years with the Nielsen Company, where we helped our clients use data and analytics to grow and improve their businesses. And I'm looking forward to bringing that experience along with digital disruption management, global client management, professional services, technology partnerships and B2C and B2B marketing to the Randstad organization and add value here. When I decided to make the decision to come to Randstad, it was because I like a transformational challenge, but it was also very much about the people and how impressed I was with the people that I met throughout the process and the culture of this company. I think as somebody said earlier, people love to work here, not only because of the history and the legacy of the company, but because of the industry leadership and where we're headed in the future. So thank you, and I appreciate your trust and confidence. Thanks to her experience with data analysis and technology, she will contribute to Randstad's digital transformation. On the Executive Board, she will become responsible for North America. The most important aspects of her agreement align with the remuneration agreement and appear in the agenda. We propose appointing her for at first 4 year term as well. There is a question in the audience. Mr. Chairman, in America, people often acquire a stake in the company. The other lady has a stake in the company. Why didn't you state for the minutes that she had to acquire a stake in the company, too? That's not part of our remuneration policy. Well, you could make it 1. You could make it 1. We'll take note of that for future debate next year. I think it's a good idea and I really hope you'll listen to me. Yes, I shrunk myself. I made myself very small when you said that. Well, we couldn't see the abstentions. We could barely see the votes cast against. Okay, this is the lineup for today. Now, Jelle, I'm pleased to open this exciting vote. Please cast your vote. And I close the vote, and you'll see on the screen that Karen Fitchuk has been appointed member of the Executive Board. When I asked Karen how you pronounce your last name, she said it's Fish Hook. And that came to mind when we spoke about fishing in an empty pond because this gives us a new tool. Now on to 5a, the proposal to reappoint Jaap Binter as Supervisory Board Member. You'll have read in the agenda and will attend his curriculum vitae. Jaap Binter is being nominated by Randstad Behr, the firm of Fritz Goldsmithing. He contributed substantially to our Supervisory Board, especially given his legal and corporate governance experience and as a contact with Vazat Bahir. The Supervisory Board proposes reappointing him for a 2 year period. You're familiar with the 2 4 year terms plus 2, plus 2. Are there any questions? Three questions. Let's start at the back. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Kees van der Leest. I have a question about Mr. Winter's sabbatical. He's Vice Chairman of the Supervisory Board. He also serves on the Audit Committee and the Governance and Nominations Committee. So he does a lot of important things. My first question is, how did the Supervisory Board deal with Mr. Winter's absence during his sabbatical? My second question is, may we assume that for the next 2 years rather than 4 years, he will basically attend all meetings. And a follow-up question is you said that the next term would be 2 years at that standard or maximum or do you have a different reason for that? Well, we were very transparent about his well deserved sabbatical. And for your information, yes, took a magnificent bicycle trip from the North Cape spanning 1,000 of kilometers. We'll miss Jaap and his of course, we missed Jaap and his skills. But thanks to judicious management, we transferred the topics where Jaap could not attend the meetings to meetings where he could be present. Those were the topics where he significantly contributed. I'm not going to take another 3 month bicycle trip. No more sabbaticals. I'm going to attend the meetings and I'm happy to do so. As for the 2x4 plus 2 plus 2, this is the first time we're appointing somebody for an initial 2 year term. We discussed that at length. They also told you the process that we evaluate our own performance very carefully and intensively. I'd just like to add that this is the standard in keeping with the new Dutch corporate governance code. Thank you. I'm Thijs Bruning. I understand that supervisory board members are always appointed by shareholders, but you're being appointed by a single shareholder who is not present today. Could you explain the situation and how you're representing the interest of that one shareholder who unfortunately is not ceded to my right. I'm not being appointed by that one shareholder. I'm being appointed by you as the shareholders meeting. And there's an arrangement between Randstad Bahir and Randstad that Randstad Bahir, as long as it holds more than 25% of the shares, is entitled to proposed candidates. And ultimately, if the Supervisory Board adopts that proposal, you'll vote on it as shareholders. And the idea is for Randstad Bahir to remain carefully in sync with the company. The impression of both Randstad and Randstad Bahir is that it's useful for Randstad Bahir to retain this position over the long term and to continue supporting Randstad during this transitional period. That was explicitly Mr. Goldschmeiding's intention to leave his interest in Randstad for the long term benefit of Randstad. And we wanted to establish that by reaching this agreement with Randstad subject to the approval of the shareholders. Our role within that as supervisory board member is like those of all other supervisory board members. I have a legal obligation to consider the lawful interests of all stakeholders, not only those of Randstad Bahir, but I feel it's important that the interests of Randstad Bahir are discussed in this within the Supervisory Board. That's the bond between the majority the shareholder and the company, Okay. You may remember Jaap well from the early Tabak's plot years, and you may remember that Robert Jan van der Kraatz served on the Monitoring Committee lately. So in terms of governance, I think this answer is right. I'm Mr. Jorna from the VEB. At the risk of you giving me a lesson in corporate governance, I'll take that risk. Quite honestly, I understood from the governance code that basically it's 2 4 year terms. And if you run into problems or if your expertise is that type of expertise, you can extend it by 2 2 year terms. Is this such an extension situation? Or is it simply standard that you want to serve out the 12 years? And in that case, Aran Sotka here has a problem. And I don't know whether you can have recorded that you'll always be appointed by the majority shareholder. But Heineken, you see that people up until their dying day, I think, serve on the Supervisory Board. So I don't know what options still remain. Your strengths are greatly acclaimed, and you contribute extremely important expertise to the Supervisory Board. So we're delighted to vote in favor of you. But a second point is that the position of a non independent Supervisory Board member as Vice Chair might be problematic because who was Vice Chair when you were gone for 3 months if Mr. Decker was unable to operate? And is it standard practice to appoint somebody who is not independent as Vice Chair? [SPEAKER MARCO TRONCHETTI PROVERA:] Well, no, that's not standard practice and we discussed that intensively together. Nonetheless, we believe that this was right for the company given the extremely independent position of Jaap Binter and in the previous years. So he's an excellent Vice Chair. How did you solve the problems during those 3 months? Well, the the honest answer is that I was present. And even without me, if you look at the strengths and abilities seated at the table, I'm sure that we'd have managed. And we can certainly manage a month without him, yes. Okay? Can we proceed to the vote? So the vote is open. The vote is closed. And on the screen, you will see that the proposal has been carried with 95.03%. Congratulations. Yap. Agenda Item 5B, proposal to reappoint Babur Bora as a member of Supervisory Board. In the agenda, you will have found her resume. Barbara Bora has made a valuable contribution to our Board and the remuneration committee, particularly in view of her international management experience. The Supervisory Board, therefore, proposes to appoint her for her 2nd term of 4 years. Are there any questions? And the vote is closed. And on the screen, you will see that the proposal has been carried with 99.54%. 5C is the proposal to reappoint Rudy Provost as a member of Supervisory Board, and also his resume has been included in the agenda. Rudi Provost has made a valuable contribution to our Board and the Governance and Nomination Committee, particularly in view of his international management experience. The Supervisory Board, therefore, proposes to reappoint him for a term a second term of 4 years. Are there any questions? No questions. Gjerle, the vote is open. The vote is closed. And you will see that the proposal has been carried with 99.53%. Tonight, we will provide aftercare for Jaap. A question? Well, usually, there is a question whether there are any suggestions for other members of the Supervisory Board for now or in the future. And now we'd like to propose Jan Kees de Jarche. As a politician, he has a lot of international experience. He knows a lot about finance as well as about IT. He's involved in many, many startups, so I think that, that would be a valuable addition to the Supervisory Board for next year. Thank you. With that, we can proceed to 6A, which is the proposal to extend the authority of the Executive Board to issue shares and to restrict or exclude the preemptive right to issue any shares. 6b, the proposal to authorize the Executive Board to repurchase shares and 6c, which is the proposal to cancel purchased shares repurchase shares. You'll find the explanatory note in the agenda of the meeting. Do you have any questions about one of these proposals? Thank you. My name is Bruni. Do you have any serious plans to give away this authority or to implement or carry out this authority? Or is this just a matter of copy and pasting this item on the agenda? I would actually prefer to say the latter, but I'm looking at my colleagues to see whether they would like to correct me. They say that's fine. So this the purpose is that, course, we have share programs for ourselves. So once we've the share is vested, we don't want the share capital to become diluted. So it's in order to offset that, and we've been doing that for a long, long time. Jelle, yes, we're going to vote, first of all, on 6A, which is the proposal to extend the authority of the Executive Board to issue shares and to restrict or exclude the preemptive right to any share issue of shares. The vote is open. And the vote is closed, and you will see the results on the screen. The proposal has been carried with 99.98%. The next proposal is the proposal to authorize the Executive Board to repurchase shares. The vote is open. And the vote is closed. And you will see on the screen that the proposal has been carried with 99.96%. And then finally, the proposal to cancel or repurchase shares. The vote is open. The vote is closed. You see that the proposal has been carried with 99.99%. Agenda item 7, which is the proposal to reappoint Stefan Braidfeld as a member of the Board of the Trust Office, Stoechten, Admestraadikantorpferente and Euler Randstad. You'll find a CV in this agenda to the meeting. In accordance with the articles association of the foundation, Randstad is proposing to reappoint him as a member of the Board A for a term of 4 years. Stefan is here. Can you please stand? And the vote is closed. And on the screen, you will see the results. Proposal has been carried with 99.98%. Thank you. Congratulations. Which brings us to Item 8 of the agenda, which is the proposal to reappoint the Leuitt accountants as the external auditor for the financial year 2020. Pursuant to the law, the General Meeting of Shareholder instructs an external auditor with the task of auditing the financial statements. The proposal is to instruct Deloitte to audit the financial statements for the financial year 2020. Do you have any questions? No? Jelle. So the vote is open for this last item on the agenda. Proposal has been carried with 99.98%, which is an excellent result, says the Chairman. Agenda item 9, any other business? Who can I give the floor? Now we don't have to look at the back of the room. Two questions here in front. Mr. Stevenson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You sponsored the Formula 1 team for a while, and you discontinued that. But we have an excellent racer here in the Netherlands. His name is Max Verstappen. Have you ever considered sponsoring him? No. No. And why not? No. Well, sponsor you engage in sponsoring in order to become well known. And we are very well known in the Netherlands, so it's quite useless. If Max were Japanese or an Australian or American, we may consider it. But Max is Dutch, so there's no added value in investing money in him. But I agree with you, he's a fantastic talent. Yes, but he travels the world. He travels the world. Yes, he does. So you can see him everywhere. Thank you. Last question now for today. What an honor. My name is Jorna, VEB Chairman, The Director, International Client Strategies and Commercial goals of Randstad moved to manpower, Jeroen Sminkles. That's surprising. Don't you have a non competition clause in the contracts? And don't you fear that this gentleman that really, truly knows a lot about the company, also with respect to the strategy for the next few years, that he's going to help manpower? Well, two things. Well, it's a wonderful title job title. He didn't have that job title with us. And yes, indeed, we do have clauses. So he's not allowed to take clients along with him. I don't think this is the time and the place to discuss it, but we do have those matters covered in our contracts. So that's it. Thank you. Item 10, closing. I'm closing this meeting, and I would like to thank you for coming, for taking the floor. And obviously, I would invite you to take a drink with us in the lobby. See you next year. Thank you.

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