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## Chief Executive Officer’s letter 

## A year ago Syngenta announced its new strategy, based on the development of a fully integrated offer on a global crop basis. 

The strategy reflects our ambition: to bring greater food security in an environmentally sustainable way to an increasingly populous world, by creating a worldwide step change in farm productivity. The positioning of growers at the center of the strategy is fundamental to its success, with a recognition that their needs differ from one country to another, indeed often from field to field. 

In the face of mounting economic and environmental challenges, growers’ lives are increasingly complex as they seek to optimize their crops. That is why we have made integration the first pillar of our strategy, bringing together our crop protection and seeds businesses in order to deliver complete solutions from pre-planting through to the harvesting and marketing of the crop. The combined offer will be marketed by a single sales force whose competence is being enhanced through extensive cross-training. This model, successfully piloted in our second- largest market Brazil prior to this year’s launch, was introduced in 16 of our 19 territories in 2011. It will be fully implemented in all territories by mid-2012, six months ahead of schedule. 

Integration of the portfolio will also enable us to go beyond pest control and yield, looking more broadly at areas such as the efficient use of water and nutrients. We will do this by building on our proven strength in chemistry and genetics and incorporating services and adjacent technologies. Our offer will continue 

to be judged in terms of yield and quality, but it will bring added benefits – not simply convenience, but also the capacity to deal with previously unsolved or even unidentified problems. 

The second pillar of the strategy is innovation. Our annual investment in Research and Development (R&D) exceeds US$1 billion and by leveraging this across the combined business, we will achieve higher returns on that investment. Our R&D teams are now fully aligned behind a model that moves away from the single product paradigm and takes a crop-based approach that can deliver a merging of genetic and chemical solutions. Our definition of innovation includes the development of novel go-to-market models and actively encourages value-adding partnerships and collaborations in order to bring new offers to the grower more quickly. 

Outperformance is the third pillar and means delivering superior customer and shareholder value. Customer value is measured in terms of crop yield and quality for the grower and business potential for our channel partners. The initial response to the strategy from both these customer groups has been very positive. Meanwhile our portfolio continues to demonstrate its strength in the field and I am pleased to report that in 2011, with the integration process in full swing, we were again able to increase our global market share. Our sales increased by 12 percent at constant exchange rates and earnings per share by 18 percent. We achieved record free cash flow of US$1.5 billion and cash flow return on investment exceeded our 12 percent target. We are therefore able to continue our record of returning cash to shareholders and will propose at the Annual 

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