About this report

Heineken published its first Sustainability Report in 2000 with the intention of making the report a bi-annual publication. In 2006, we committed to producing an annual sustainability report in order to more effectively and transparently track our progress. This is our second annual Sustainability Report.

In last year’s report we explained our decision to focus our sustainability activities on seven areas:

This report, as with last year’s report is structured around these areas.

It is our intention to maintain these focus areas for the years to come, but we have also committed to keeping them under review and discussion with our stakeholders. In addition, we have also indicated that our Sustainability Report would contain our targets, strategy, and activities in the reporting year and the performance that was achieved by these actions. More static information such as the content of policies or the description of management systems is provided on our company website (www.heinekeninternational.com). Information on performance relating to aspects outside the seven focus areas is given in our Sustainability Data Sheet that is downloadable from the same website. This data sheet also serves as a GRI table to this report and our Annual Report 2007.

The 2007 Sustainability Report has been compiled using information sourced through our environmental and social data systems. The scope of the information presented and any relevant remarks about the reliability of data is included in the introduction to every chapter.

Dialogue

During 2007, we actively sought feedback from a number of our stakeholders (more specifically employees, people from the investment community and some NGOs) on our previous report. In general, the report and the way in which we have defined our agenda were viewed positively. Some points of potential improvement were raised by stakeholders to which we have tried to respond in this report. These changes in approach and information are set out below.

a. Compared with last year, we have opted for a uniform approach to all chapters: This layout consists of:

b. We have re-introduced commentary on our Code of Business Conduct and whistle blowing procedure in the chapter ‘Impact on developing markets’.

c. Some stakeholders noted that, especially in the area of energy, we sometimes indicated in the past that we did not meet our targets due to the effect of new acquisitions. These stakeholders wondered if we could quantify this aspect. To meet their demand, we now provide the total figure as we did before as well as the figure for breweries that have been in our scope in 2002.

One of our stakeholders has asked us to provide data on the amount of taxes we pay on a country-by-country basis. Due to the fact that most of the taxes we pay locally are excise duties and it is fairly easy to recalculate these duties back to volume or value sold, we have deemed this kind of information as competitively sensitive and have informed this stakeholder that we will not meet his requests.

We believe that stakeholder dialogue provides us with the level of insight into how to improve our sustainability performance. This report provides an overview of our recent achievements and future plans. We also intend to use it as the starting point for further dialogue with our stakeholders. So, if you have any comments or suggestions about its content, or our wider sustainability programme, please contact us.

Email: responsibility@heineken.com or write to:

Heineken International B.V.
Group Corporate Relations
P.O. Box 28
1000 AA Amsterdam
The Netherlands

In 2008, we will be more active in seeking the opinions of our stakeholders, particularly those who have a specific interest in or knowledge of our seven focus areas. In next year’s report we will again share changes we have made based on this dialogue.

Stakeholder dialogue does not only take place at a Group level. Many of our operating companies engage with their own (local) stakeholders. Increasingly they use their own local social or sustainability reports to do this. Currently, our operations in Austria, the Netherlands, Nigeria and Poland issue their own local reports, with Greece expected to issue their report in the first half of 2008. Heineken welcomes these publications as they are an important starting point for a better understanding between the local company and its own stakeholders and hence, contributes to better business decisions.

We have asked our external assurance provider, KPMG Sustainability B.V., to provide assurance on all the information presented in this report. Details of our assignment to KPMG Sustainability and their report can be found in the Appendices.

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