®ilina, June 2004

In 2004, SSE pland to invest more than 1 billion Sk.

The French company Electricité de France (EdF), which entered SSE in 2002, brought SSE an entrance ticket into the wide family of companies belonging to the EDF group. SSE, which already belongs to the family, takes advantage of all the bonuses following from the takeover.

"I think that the quality of EDF, our strategic partner, has manifested itself on all levels of SSE activities and I am persuaded that all our customers have already experienced the change." "Today, we are a stable and reliable company and our clients may fully rely on our services, which is also demonstrated by customer confidence indicators", says Mr. Jaroslav hanzel, SSE General Director.

Making the company more professional, improving the efficiency of all types of activities and a proactive approach to customers have all created conditions for SSE to invest 1, 005 billion Sk into further development.

"I have to admit that we are truly proud of the planned investment, which is by 20% higher that the last year." On one hand it is proof that our company is able to generate resources necessary for making its services more professioal and, on the other hand, it is proof that the shareholders are willing to push the company higher and higher," says Mr. Patrik Luccioni, the Board´s Chairman.

A substantial part of the investments in 2004 will be focused on distribution network and corresponding information technology, above all improving its safety and reliability to ensure higher quality standards in the SSE network. Investments will be used to do away with certain ongoing problems and weak spots in distribution and to overall improvements to the quality and reliablity in electricity supplies.

Further investments will be focused on strenghtening the call center, improving its capacity and the quality of its services.

The company will, much like in the last year, invest into ecology, above all into constructing underground distribution networks inside the towns and villages, which are required by current legislation. Investments will also be funneled to the ever-increasing need to promote and foster water protection, bird protection, waste disposal and so forth.

More and more professionals agree on the fact that the know-how provided by EDF has materially strhenghtened the position of the company and it has provided its full functionality in all its indicators. This also goes for indicators not connected directly with the sales of electricity.

"A company of the SSE type, which is practically each of the companies belonging to the EDF family all around the world, is destined to be a key player in its region. This is the nature of our business and it is the way we do it. We cannot forget that our main goal is to provide quality services to our customers, but that is not all. We need to remember our responsibility for the region we operate in and we have to behave accordingly. In order to be able to behave accordingly, we need to be strong enough and capable of sticking to all written and oral commitments we made. I think that we are more than successful doing so in ®ilina because SSE is a strong company with potential for further expansion," says Mr. Luccioni.