Vopak: Group operating profit excluding exceptional items for 2007 up 24% to EUR 272.9 million

John Paul Broeders, Chairman of the Executive Board of Royal Vopak: ‘In 2007, we pursued our extensive growth program consistently, and successfully developed the strategic focus on growth, customer focus and operational efficiency. Around the world, we made enormous efforts and worked resolutely on our large-scale expansion program and to implement our strategic initiatives. This has resulted in an additional 878,000 cbm of storage capacity coming on stream, our entry into the growing LNG market using our trusted business model and significant efficiency improvements.The number of expansion projects under development has been further increased. We are already enjoying the first benefits of the course we started on in 2006 as is among other shown by the increase in the results in the past year. Consequently, we are completely confident that we will achieve our long-term objectives sooner by following that course.’