Ahold
Annual Report 2011
Group at a glance
Message from our CEO continued
Performance IGovernance I I Financials Investors
The third strategic pillar is designed to expand Ahold's geographic reach in existing and new
markets. In 2011we grew by opening new stores and making small acquisitions. Albert Heijn
expanded outside of the Netherlands for the first time into Belgium, with plans to open at least
50 stores here by 2016. Our Giant Carlisle division opened its first store in the city of Philadelphia.
Stop Shop New York Metro acquired five former Foodtown stores in the New Jersey Shore
area and three former King Kullen stores on Staten Island, New York. Our former Ukrop's stores,
acquired in 2010 and rebranded Martin's, continued to grow sales and market share.
Our fourth pillar focuses on simplifying the business, leveraging our capabilities and scale, and
taking out costs to reinvest in providing value to our customers. One of the biggest projects we
undertook in 2011 was to launch a drive to simplify our IT systems, with the goal of reducing the
number of applications we are using by more than 50 percent. We are putting in place standard
systems, including Google and Oracle, across the business that conform to our company-wide
Ahold Retail Model. Our aim is to align our IT systems so that they are easy to replicate as we
make acquisitions and expand into new markets. At the end of last year we were ahead of our
target to complete our €350 million cost savings program for 2010-2012 and announced a new
€350 million cost savings program for the next three years, 2012-2014.
The fifth pillar underscores our commitment to responsible retailing. This is a crucial component of
our strategy and an essential part of the way we work at Ahold. All of our businesses are playing
a responsible role when it comes to our customers' health and well-being, the sourcing of the
products we sell, our impact on the environment, the communities we serve, and the people we
employ. In 2011we made good progress on all of the targets we established last year in our
priority areas of healthy living, sustainable trade, climate action, community engagement, and our
people. For example, we are well on our way to meeting our target of having 25 percent of our
total food sales in healthy products by 2015 - at the end of last year we had already reached
22.3 percent. We are continuing to engage the 218,000 employees who bring our corporate
responsibility strategy to life and make it part of our daily business. You can read more about
our strategy and achievements in our 2011 Corporate Responsibility Report.
The sixth pillar of our strategy focuses on our people. We are committed to investing in and
developing our employees, and building a diverse workforce. During 2011we strengthened our
leadership team by making a number of senior internal promotions and by hiring new people with
the skills and capabilities we need to implement our growth strategy - now and in the future. We
also made progress in transferring the capabilities we have in our different companies through
temporary leadership exchanges and longer-term international assignments. Sharing our
knowledge, skills, and expertise in this way is helping us to accelerate our performance.
Over the course of 2011, we made a number of leadership changes to Ahold's Corporate
Executive Board, Supervisory Board, and retail banners. Jeff Carr was appointed Chief Financial
Officer to succeed Kimberly Ross, who left Ahold in November. I would like to take this
opportunity to thank Kimberly for the enormous contribution she made over the 10 years that she
worked for Ahold. James McCann was appointed to a new role as our Chief Commercial
Development Officer. Both James and Jeff will be nominated for appointment to Ahold's
Corporate Executive Board at our annual General Meeting of Shareholders in April. We also had
a new member join our Supervisory Board, Rob van den Bergh. The cooperation between our
Supervisory Board and Corporate Executive Board over the course of the year was very
productive and enabled us to make significant progress in developing Ahold's growth strategy.
In our businesses, we also made several new leadership appointments in both Ahold Europe and
Ahold USA. At the beginning of the year, Sander van der Laan and Carl Schlicker took up their
roles as COO of Ahold Europe and Ahold USA, respectively. In the Netherlands, Cees van Vliet
was appointed General Manager of Albert Heijn and Marit van Egmond was appointed General
Manager of Gall Gall. In the United States, Bhavdeep Singh was appointed to the new role of
EVP of Operations for Ahold USA, Anthony Hucker was appointed Division President of Giant
Landover, and Don Sussman was named Division President of Stop Shop New York Metro.
