When I wrote to you around this time last year, my words expressed delight over the Company’s excellent start on the stock market and its inclusion in the MDAX index. This time, I am delighted to inform you that we have been able to meet both your and our high expectations: Wincor Nixdorf AG completed its first full fiscal year as a listed company with great success.

Our forecasts, which, as you know, were upgraded during the course of the year, proved correct. All of us can be proud of the significant increase of 11 % in net sales revenue and the even greater 17 % rise in operating profit.

This positive development underscores what I have been saying all along: Wincor Nixdorf is a reliable company that keeps its promises. In this context, let me emphasize that business success and confidence cannot be taken for granted; both must be continuously won.

Again in fiscal 2004/2005, we did just that and were able to reap the rewards, including the enthusiastic interest that we have received from the financial community, an excellent share price performance and our inclusion in the Morgan Stanley Capital International Index.

We believe these achievements stemmed from our unrelenting commitment to customers, our collaborative style and our constant hard work and attention to improving our in-house processes.

A good indicator of our performance is the series of new outsourcing contracts we won in branch banking. After careful analysis, several banks decided to transfer the operation of their ATM and self-service networks and, in some cases, their entire branch IT systems to Wincor Nixdorf. These outsourcing contracts show how far we are in realizing our new strategy. In the past, we used to speak about supplying ATMs, ePOS systems and software. Now we talk to our retail and banking customers about how our advanced hardware and software solutions and our IT services can support the substantial changes impacting the tasks and processes in their branches and stores. This is innovation in the broader sense of the word.

Success of this kind comes only to those who are recognized as partners and are constantly in search of ways to change their customers’ business processes with real added value in mind–and who offer the latest technologies, service infrastructures and corresponding resources. With our customer-led, proactive approach, we have steadily improved our position among the top three providers worldwide in both segments. As part of this more and more of our revenue is now coming from non-product solutions and services.

We see this development as proof of the confidence customers have in our company and, at the same time, a reminder to remain committed to serving their needs. We want to continue to grow our business together with customers and build our own processes around their needs. How we are achieving this as a win-win partnership day for day is described in more detail in some project reports contained in this annual report.

In terms of strategic change, we have made good progress in several areas. We have grown our core retail and banking businesses with hardware, software and product-related services-efforts which we will also be redoubling in future. Internationalization was also driven forward apace, and we have achieved higher levels of business with solutions and services as well as opening up new streams such as outsourcing.

In the current 2005/2006 fiscal year, we expect to continue providing a favorable environment for our business and growing in our targeted markets. We are therefore confident that we will be able to continue along our path of sustained growth. We are predicting an increase of 8 % in net sales revenue and a 10 % rise in operating profit (EBITA).

Our motivated, hard-working employees are the greatest guarantee we have to implement our strategy. We are proud of their accomplishments. I personally would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to all of them for their great commitment and effort. We will continue to ensure that our employees have the flexibility they need to perform and to award them accordingly.

Our long-term goal is to keep customers, employees and, not least, you, our shareholders, satisfied. In the past fiscal year, we succeeded in making part of this a reality. We kept our promises and proved our reliability, which will continue to be our guiding principle moving forward. With this in mind, we offer our thanks to all those who have placed their trust in us over the last 12 months.

Karl-Heinz Stiller