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Investor Relations
(Excerpts from the speech. Content rights reserved by the speaker and CEIBS. Use of the content must be with the prior approval from CEIBS.)
 
Michael Jacobi (Biography)
CFO of Ciba Specialty Chemicals
Nov. 29, 2002
Good afternoon. I am pleased to be with you. Who here knows Ciba? I would like to very quickly talk a little about Ciba and talk about investor relations. As CFO of our company, I spend one third of my time on investor relations.
Let me give you a piece of advice that we use for investors. I'll tell you: Who is Ciba? What is investor relations? What does it mean, really? Who are our customers? How do we meet them? What is that thing called investor relations? And some investor relations dos and don'ts.
We are Ciba Specialty Chemicals. We produce so-called specialty chemicals. It's something you do not find in shops. You cannot find us. We work primarily on things that change the colour, performance or look and feel of certain products you buy. You will always find us in small ingredients in something bigger. It's like spices in food. We are not spices in food, but ingredients in other products.
These are the segments, the business areas that we are in. I'll give you an example of our products as we go along. Overall, the company has about $5 billion US dollars in sales. We are in Switzerland. That is why we talk about Swiss francs. Our headquarters is in Basel, Switzerland. Our four segments we're in are about the same size, so it is a very balanced portfolio and we have very strong market positions. That's one of the good things when you're talking about investor relations. We are a large company, a billion-dollar industry, and we have very strong segments and leading positions. It's much easier to explain your company and investor relations this way than if you come in and say, "We are a small company and we don't particularly define the market."

What are our products? One is plastic additives. All these core businesses are about $1.5 billion US Dollars in size. They are very large companies that are number one in the market world-wide. They are spread all over the world, obviously also in China. Being a European-based company, for us, the biggest market is the United States. The second biggest is Germany. The third biggest market is China. For us, China is very important in terms of presence. We have a very large presence here. We have a lot of factories, several in Shanghai and Qingdao. It's really a very important market.

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