Prysmian s.p.a., shareholders’ meeting

The Shareholders' Meeting of Prysmian S.p.A., meeting today in ordinary session, has approved the Financial Statements for the year 2007 and a €0.417 per share dividend pay-out to Shareholders for a total of €75.25 million. The dividend will be paid out from 24 April 2008, with coupon detachment on 21 April 2008, and will be applied to the shares outstanding at the latter date.

The Shareholders’ Meeting has also passed a resolution for the launch of a share buy-back plan. The plan calls for the buy-back of up to 18,000,000 ordinary shares to be executed in one or more buy-backs. The buy-backs may be executed up to the amount of undistributed profits and available reserves as recognised in the last annual report regularly approved. The term of the plan is 18 months effective from today.
The objective of the plan is the efficient management of the Company’s capital and to give the possibility to build a stock of treasury shares that could be also used in any extraordinary transactions, for any share-based incentive plan reserved for Prysmian Group employees and in any case for all the purposes allowed by the laws in force. To date, the Company has no treasury shares, neither directly nor indirectly.

“The dividend policy adopted by Prysmian has the two-fold objective of remunerating Prysmian shareholders and maintaining an adequate level of financial resources to sustain both internal and external growth”, CEO Valerio Battista explained. “2007 brought strong results in terms of both sales growth and improvement of profitability, and going forward Prysmian will rely on a clear and sustainable growth strategy, allowing it to continue to create value for its shareholders".

Prysmian
The Prysmian group is a world leader in the energy and telecommunication cables industry, with a strong market position in higher-added value market segments. Organised into two business units, Energy Cables & Systems (submarine and terrestrial cables for electricity transmission and distribution) and Telecom Cables & Systems (optical fibres and cables for video, data and voice transmission, and copper telecom cables), the Prysmian Group has a global presence with subsidiaries in 36 countries, 54 plants in 21 countries, 7 Research & Development Centres in Europe, the United States and South America, and more than 12,000 employees. Specialising in the development of products and systems designed to meet clients' specific requirements, Prysmian's main competitive strengths include its focus on research and development, its innovative products and production processes, and the use of advanced proprietary technologies. Prysmian is listed on the Milan Stock Exchange Blue Chip index.