Corporate Expansion and Boundary of the Report
Our expansion promotes the sustainability of our enterprise and our potential influence within the global community:
In a two step acquisition in July 2007 and August 2008, we acquired the former Trammell Crow Meghraj (“TCM”), one of the largest privately held real estate services companies in India. TCM’s operations were combined with our Indian operations and we now operate as Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj in a number of cities throughout India.
In May 2008, we acquired Kemper’s Holding GmbH (“Kemper’s”), a Germany-based retail specialist, making us the largest property advisory business in Germany and providing us with new offices in Leipzig, Cologne and Hannover.
In July 2008, we acquired Staubach Holdings Inc. (“Staubach”), a U.S. real estate services firm specializing in tenant representation. Staubach, with 1,000 employees, significantly enhanced our presence in key markets across the United States and made us an industry leader in local, national and global tenant representation. The Staubach acquisition also established us as the market leader in public sector services and added scale to our industrial brokerage, investment sales, corporate finance and project and development services.
In addition to the acquisitions noted above, we completed 12 other acquisitions in 2007 and 13 in 2008. These strategic acquisitions further broadened the global platform we make available to our clients. These acquisitions were completed in England, Scotland, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Canada, Brazil and the United States.
We made no material new acquisitions in 2009 due to market conditions and our focus on maintaining a healthy balance sheet. We expect that our acquisition activity will remain substantially curtailed during 2010 as well.
In June 2009, we sold 6,500,000 shares of our common stock at $35.00 per share in an underwritten secondary public offering, resulting in net proceeds of $217 million which we used to repay outstanding debt and strengthen our balance sheet.
In 2009, we generated revenue of $2.5 billion across our four business segments diversified among euros, British pounds, Australian dollars, Singapore dollars, Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, and a variety of other currencies in addition to U.S. dollars. We also took aggressive but targeted cost actions throughout the year to align the size of our business and our costs in the face of the continued worldwide economic downturn. In the midst of this challenging environment, we continued to perform for clients while protecting our businesses, market positions and top talent. With the pace of recovery differing across global markets, we will capture emerging opportunities by leveraging our leading market positions and maintaining our focus on managing costs. We have grown by expanding our client base and the range of our services and products, both organically and through strategic acquisitions and mergers. Our extensive global platform and in-depth knowledge of local real estate markets enable us to serve as a single-source provider of solutions for our clients’ full range of real estate needs.
Boundary of the Report
This CSR report includes data and information across all three global regions in which Jones Lang LaSalle has operations, which in turn form our four business segments: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); Asia Pacific; and our global investment management business, LaSalle Investment Management.
External Assurance
For this report, we did not undertake a formal external verification. However, as our sustainability and social responsibility efforts continue to grow and expand throughout our organization, we will explore the possibility of seeking external assurance for future CSR reports.