ASX ANNOUNCEMENT 7 April 2022

Scentre Group (ASX: SCG)

Scentre Group Limited Annual General Meeting - Address to Securityholders

Attached are copies of the addresses to be given at today's Annual General Meeting by:

  • • Mr Brian Schwartz AM, Chair; and

  • • Mr Peter Allen, Chief Executive Officer.

This announcement has been authorised for release by the Company Secretary.

Further information:

Company Secretary

Investor Relations

Corporate Affairs/Media

Maureen McGrath

Andrew Clarke

Alexis Lindsay

+61 2 9358 7439

+61 2 9358 7612

+61 2 9358 7739

Scentre Group Limited

ABN 66 001 671 496

Scentre Management Limited

RE1 Limited

RE2 Limited

ABN 41 001 670 579

ABN 80 145 743 862

ABN 41 145 744 065

AFS Licence No: 230329 as responsible

AFS Licence No: 380202 as responsible

AFS Licence No: 380203 as responsible

entity of Scentre Group Trust 1

entity of Scentre Group Trust 2

entity of Scentre Group Trust 3

ABN 55 191 750 378 ARSN 090 849 746

ABN 66 744 282 872 ARSN 146 934 536

ABN 11 517 229 138 ARSN 146 934 652

Level 30, 85 Castlereagh Street

GPO Box 4004

Sydney NSW 2000 Australia

Sydney NSW 2001 Australia

scentregroup.com

CHAIR'S ADDRESS SCENTRE GROUP LIMITED ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

HELD ON THURSDAY, 7 APRIL 2022 AT 10:00AM

Good morning everyone and welcome to the Annual General Meeting of Scentre Group Limited.

I am Brian Schwartz, the Chair of Scentre Group.

The Company Secretary has informed me that a quorum is present, and I therefore declare the meeting open.

In doing so, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land I am on. Recognising that many of us are on different lands of different traditional custodians, I would like to pay my respects to each of their Elders, past, present and emerging.

Our AGM is being held in a hybrid format this year. I am conducting the meeting from the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney and securityholders are also participating online.

I would like to welcome on stage with me Mike Ihlein, Chair of our Audit and Risk Committee, non-Executive Director Ilana Atlas, our Chief Executive Officer, Peter Allen, our Company Secretary, Maureen McGrath, non-Executive Director Catherine Brenner, and Andrew Harmos, Chair of our Human Resources Committee.

Mike and I are each standing for re-election today. Ilana and Catherine are both standing for election following their respective appointments since our last AGM.

To facilitate physical distancing, those Directors not speaking are seated in the front row and I would like to welcome Carolyn Kay, Steven Leigh, Guy Russo, Margie Seale, and Mike Wilkins.

Ms Megan Wilson, representing the Group's auditors EY, is here today and we are also joined by members of Scentre Group's executive team, including Elliott Rusanow our CFO.

Today we will be farewelling Steven Leigh, who will be retiring from the Board at the conclusion of today's meeting. It will also be Peter Allen's last Annual General Meeting as CEO of Scentre Group. I will say a few words in recognition of these events later in meeting.

[Procedural matters addressed]

Having gone through the formalities, I will now deliver my address.

Good morning fellow securityholders and guests.

On behalf of the Board of Scentre Group, I welcome you and thank you for participating in today's AGM.

The Group has remained focused on Our Purpose throughout another COVID-19 interrupted year.

Operating profit and distribution have increased this year and I want to thank our team for delivering these results, even with more COVID-19 restrictions than 2020.

This demonstrates our proactive approach to generating long-term value for our securityholders.

Our CEO Peter Allen will address our operating and financial performance shortly.

The past year has reinforced how essential our Westfield Living Centres are to people and communities.

We are very proud of our team, particularly how they kept adapting to the changing conditions, keeping our centres open and safe.

Since Scentre Group was established in 2014, we have focused on our people and creating a strong operational culture where talent can thrive.

As part of this, we are committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where diversity of perspectives and "speaking up" is highly valued.

Despite this COVID interrupted year, the Group maintained its focus on measuring our employee engagement, which has remained very high at 85%. This places us in the top 5% of companies globally.

We have continued to increase female representation at all levels of the organisation and are well positioned to achieve our goal of 40:40:20 across the Group's workplace by 2025. We retained 94% of our key talent in 2021, against a target of 90%. This was pleasing given the competitive labour market conditions we are facing.

Our people and culture are a very significant part of our approach to being a responsible, sustainable business, along with our community, environmental and economic performance.

In mid-March, we released our 2021 Responsible Business Report detailing the progress we have made across the four pillars just mentioned. We also released our second Modern Slavery Statement.

The Board maintains oversight of the Group's climate risk and resilience strategy. It is pleasing to report that we have already reduced our emissions by 30% since the Group was established in 2014. This stands us in good stead to achieve our net zero emissions target by 2030 across our wholly-owned portfolio.

I commend our team's continued focus on further integrating responsible business objectives into our business.

We have done a lot of work in addressing last year's vote against our 2020 Remuneration Report. In recent months, we have met with major securityholders and proxy advisers. We appreciate their preparedness to meet with us - some multiple times.

We have listened and made adjustments, in particular, to the measurement criteria and outcomes under the short-term variable remuneration and long-term variable remuneration plans.

Based on these recent discussions we are pleased to have received securityholder and proxy adviser support for this year's Remuneration Report.

Andrew Harmos, our Chair of the Human Resources Committee is with us today. I would like to thank Andrew for his absolute focus and commitment.

Each year the Board, with the assistance of the Nomination Committee, completes a review of its performance. The outcome of this year's review was very positive and has informed the overall work of the Board and committees.

It has been a significant year for succession planning for the Board and management.

We are committed to continuing to ensure that we appoint directors with an appropriate mix of skills, knowledge, experience and diversity.

Recently the focus has been on addressing succession in leadership of Board committees as well as the Board's overall gender balance. Currently 40% of Board members are female.

During the year we were very pleased to welcome Ilana Atlas to the Board. Catherine Brenner joined the Board on 1 March 2022. Both Ilana and Catherine stand for election today with the full support of the Board.

Mike Ihlein and I are offering ourselves for re-election with the full support of our fellow Directors.

Steven Leigh has announced his retirement from the Board and on behalf of the Directors I extend my thanks to him for his valuable contribution to Scentre Group and respect his decision to focus on other aspects of his non-executive career. We wish Steve well in his future endeavours.

The Board has continually been focused on succession planning at a management level.

After a comprehensive global search we were delighted to announce our Chief Financial Officer Elliott Rusanow as Peter Allen's successor. This follows Peter's decision to step down as CEO on 30 September this year after eight years as our inaugural CEO.

I will make further remarks later in the meeting to acknowledge Peter's extraordinary contribution to our business given this will be his last AGM with us as CEO.

On behalf of your Board, we remain confident about the underlying strength of the consumer and the economic recovery across Australia and New Zealand.

Our business is well positioned to fulfil Our Ambition to grow, supporting our customers and continuing to deliver long-term growth for our securityholders.

I thank my fellow Directors and the Scentre Group team for their valuable contribution and support in what has been a challenging year.

Thank you for your continued support of Scentre Group. I would now like to introduce our CEO Peter Allen to deliver his address.

-ENDS-

This is an excerpt of the original content. To continue reading it, access the original document here.

Attachments

  • Original Link
  • Original Document
  • Permalink

Disclaimer

Scentre Group Limited published this content on 06 April 2022 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 06 April 2022 23:32:01 UTC.