Preface from the Chairman of the Managing Board

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In 2005, Bank Austria Creditanstalt achieved the best results in the bank’s history. This success confirms that we have been moving in the right direction over the past years. Consolidation, targeted growth and the move on to the European playing field have paid off. In the new UniCredit Group we have assumed an essential role as sub-holding company for operations in Central and Eastern Europe. This stands for continuity in our development – we are now playing in the top league of the European banking industry.

• Net income before taxes for 2005 amounted to € 1,301 m, exceeding the target of € 1 bn which we set ourselves a year ago. The increase over the figure for 2004 is more than one-half (52%). A substantial contribution to this result came from our successful banking subsidiaries in CEE, which continued to pursue growth in their countries. In Austria, a mature and overbanked market, we also achieved volume growth and improved the earnings position. The implementation of our new business model is almost complete; this will enable us to improve profitability in business with small and medium-sized companies, too. We reinvested a large part of one-off income generated during the year to improve the structure of our Austrian business and we also used part of this income to make provisions for planned integration projects.
• The formation of the new UniCredit Group is another big step forward for Bank Austria Creditanstalt in its long development into a bank of European stature. As a member of Europe’s fourth-largest bank, we can offer customers in our markets the status of a major international bank and we can also make better use of our international business expertise. The large Group benefits from mutual network advantages and can achieve economies of scale in businesses where size is an advantage. Within the CEE Division of UniCredit Group we will be responsible for further developing operations in 24 countries. In doing so we can draw on integration experience which we have gained in numerous mergers of CEE subsidiaries of HVB and BA-CA in the past years. And we will also prove our own ability to integrate into the Group. Bank Austria Creditanstalt and UniCredit complement each other perfectly in terms of culture, geography and business profile. Our structures are very similar, and we have identical objectives and values.

Predecessor institutions in our bank’s 150-year history successfully operated European networks, and we can still find traces of them today. From the very beginning, Bank Austria Creditanstalt has seen its mission as making a contribution to European integration by serving its customers. Let us combine strong cross-regional structures with regional diversity, let us use the opportunity to become a truly European bank!

Yours sincerely,

Erich Hampel