SERENA HOTELS HOLD ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
East Africa’s leading hotel, resort and safari lodges company, Serena Hotels, is holding their annual general meeting today at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, preceded by a meeting of the Board of Directors at their Kenyan flagship property, The Nairobi Serena Hotel.
While the group is traditionally reserved about giving extensive advance information on performance – after all the shareholders expect to be told such news ‘fresh’, information has nevertheless been obtained that the record performance of Kenya’s tourism industry in 2010 has translated into an equally impressive result for Serena, bringing smiles to institutional and individual shareholders. The audited results of the financial year of 2010 are posted on the group’s website, accessible via www.serenahotels.com. Many of them started to arrive at the venue early, with over 700 of them expected to participate in the AGM, making it one of the most keenly awaited meetings of its kind in corporate Kenya. The company is ‘cross listed’ already in Tanzania with the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange, something expected to happen in the not too distant future also with the Uganda Securities Exchange in Kampala. Major shareholder remains the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, in short AKFED, with 37.23 percent but ‘ownership’ has spread deep into both institutional as well as private share portfolios as a result of the company’s sterling financial performance even during the most trying years for Kenya Tourism in the past. Other major shareholders are French development and finance corporation PROPARCO with 7.35 percent, Standard Chartered Nominees with 5.79 percent, Jubilee Insurance Company of Kenya with 5.6 percent and their sister company Industrial Promotion Services with 5.19 percent while the rest are spread widely across Eastern Africa.
Serena’s ‘Collection’ has expanded from its erstwhile home patch of Kenya, where the company started out in the mid 70’s with properties in Nairobi, Mombasa, Amboseli and the Masai Mara, to Tanzania, Zanzibar, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Mozambique. Serena Hotels offers one of the widest choices for luxurious city hotels, top of the range beach resorts and uniquely positioned and superbly appointed safari camps and lodges in the most fascinating national parks across the Eastern African region.
Serena has in the recent past opened two sensational safari camps in the Selous Game Reserve south of the commercial capital of Dar es Salaam and will within weeks open another ‘signature collection’ camp at the shores of Lake Elementaita, located between lakes Naivasha and Nakuru and home to tens of thousands of the lesser flamingo, painting the lake shores in pink colours.
Reporting ‘live’ from Nairobi / Kenya today.
