Stable earnings trend expected despite Biblis outage

The world financial and economic crises will affect our business operations to a relatively small extent. The RWE Group’s earnings are expected to maintain their high level. However, we expect our electricity generation to be hard hit compared with 2008. The reasons are the planned outages of the two units at Biblis and the rise in fuel procurement costs. In addition, we expect lower oil and gas prices to depress earnings in our upstream business. This will be contrasted by the positive impact of higher realized electricity wholesale prices. Furthermore, we anticipate that we will be able to stabilize our earnings in the regulated German grid business through further cost reductions. As explained in the chapter value added, we expect our efficiency-enhancement programme to make an increasing contribution to earnings. The target for 2009 is €450 million, compared to the reference year (2006). The point of focus is to improve the performance of our regulated German electricity and gas grid activities. In addition, we plan to improve the technical availability of our power plants.

We expect EBITDA in the order of last year (€8,773 million including operating income from investments). The same applies to the operating result (2008: €6,826 million) and recurrent net income (2008: €3,367 million).