Speech by Anders Moberg, President and CEO at Ahold's Annual General Meeting

Market Wire, May, 2007

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 3, 2007 Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming today. As you will all know by now, this is the last time I will address you at Ahold's Annual General Meeting as President and CEO. My four years with Ahold have been challenging and exciting. When I joined in 2003, the focus was on saving the company. And we have. Despite the enormous challenges and skepticism we faced, today Ahold is again a company we can all be proud of. The business is back on track and we are firmly focused on profitable growth.

How different we are today from our darkest hour in 2003. Since then, we have transformed the business. We have rebuilt its foundations and put in place stronger controls and a new governance system recognized today as one of the best in the industry. We have significantly reduced our operating costs and we have cut net debt by more than half. However, even though we have accomplished a great deal, not everything has gone according to plan. We have not been able to fully turn around all of our businesses in the timeframe we had hoped but we are making good progress on those that remain core to our strategy.

Our achievements so far have not come easily. Our progress is a testament to the commitment and hard work of our thousands of employees around the world. Thanks to their skill and determination, we are building a healthier, more sustainable company. I am pleased to say that we met all the financial targets we set for 2006. Although they fell short of the original targets we set in 2003, I believe Ahold can and will achieve sustainable top line and bottom line growth in the future.

At the end of last year, we unveiled our plan for the next phase of Ahold's development following a company-wide review. As part of that plan, we announced last night that we have reached agreement on the sale of U.S. Foodservice to private equity firms Clayton Dubilier & Rice (CD&R) and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) for USD 7.1 billion. As you have just heard, we will be asking shareholders to approve the sale at a separate meeting next month. There were many who wanted us to sell U.S. Foodservice back in 2003. I said then that it would be a mistake at that time and would destroy shareholder value. Instead, we focused on rebuilding U.S. Foodservice, the business and its culture. I am extremely pleased with the agreed price we have announced higher than many in the market had predicted. The proposed sale of U.S Foodservice follows the announcement we made last December to sell our Polish operations to Carrefour for EUR 375 million also for a price higher than the market expected.

The proceeds from U.S. Foodservice, our Polish operations, and the other businesses we are currently divesting, will make it possible for us to reduce net debt even further and to return money to our shareholders, who have been patient for so long. Last November, we consulted with our largest shareholders on how best to make the return. Their view, and this was nearly unanimous, was that we should buy back shares. I am delighted that we are going to be able to return EUR 3 billion this way, subject to the approval of the sale of U.S. Foodservice. We will start the buyback program as soon as possible.

To better position the company for profitable and sustainable growth, we have refocused our portfolio. We are concentrating our resources on our core retail businesses in the United States and Europe where we can achieve and maintain a number one or number two position. Once the sale of U.S. Foodservice is completed, we will again be a company fully focused on retail.

In each of our markets, we are building our local banners into powerful consumer brands. We are providing better value in our stores in order to grow identical sales and attract more customers. At Albert Heijn, for example, transactions last year rose by ten per cent and market share by another 1.1 percent to 27.5 per cent. Today, Albert Heijn is one of our most profitable and successful businesses. In Scandinavia, ICA is also performing well as a result of its successful repositioning strategy in the Swedish market. We are addressing the challenges we have in Norway and recently appointed new management there. ICA also expanded in the Baltics last year by taking full ownership of its former joint venture in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This was another important step in achieving a leading position in that region. In the Czech Republic, our Albert and Hypernova banners have a new management team in place driving operational and store improvement programs. Customers have again voted the Albert chain the best supermarket in the country for the second year in a row. In the United States, we have had mixed performance in our retail operations in recent years. At Giant-Carlisle, we have a successful strategy and have consistently achieved solid identical sales growth.

At Stop & Shop and Giant-Landover, we are re-engineering our businesses to maintain our leading positions and grow identical sales. We are rolling out a value repositioning program to improve price, convenience, quality, and assortment in all of our stores. The program will cover approximately 75 per cent of sales and will be completed towards the end of 2008. Customers are reacting positively to the changes we are making on a category-by-category basis. We have had an encouraging start but there is still much to do. To help us transfer knowledge and successful working methods across all of our businesses we have restructured Ahold into two continental platforms. The U.S. platform is headed up by Larry Benjamin and the European platform by Dick Boer. They, along with a new team of top managers that have been appointed across the Ahold Group over the past 12 months, are changing the way we do business.