Media Release

Basel, 28 February 2005

Roche increases dividend by 21 percent

Annual General Meeting approves eighteenth consecutive annual dividend increase – Board members Humer, Hoffmann and Bell re-elected for another four years

The Annual General Meeting of Roche was held in Basel today. It was attended by 565 shareholders representing 144,885,040, or 90.55 percent, of a total of 160,000,000 shares. All the proposals put forward by the Board of Directors were adopted. The Meeting approved the 2004 annual report and financial statements and authorised payment of an annual dividend for 2004 of 2 Swiss francs (gross) per share and non-voting equity security, an increase of 21% percent over the previous year. This is Roche’s eighteenth consecutive dividend increase. Franz B. Humer, John Bell and André Hoffmann were re-elected to the Board for further four-year terms.

In his address to shareholders, Chairman and CEO Franz B. Humer summed up the year as follows: ‘We achieved, and in some cases even exceeded, our ambitious goals for the year. We reported the highest operating profit in Roche’s history, launched two breakthrough anticancer medicines and intensified the focus on our core capabilities. Thanks to a very strong operating performance and the gain from the sale of our consumer health business, net income more than doubled, reaching 6.6 billion Swiss francs.
These achievements benefit customers, employees and shareholders alike. Over the last three years Roche’s market value has increased by more than 10 billion Swiss francs. During this period the return on Roche securities, including price appreciation and dividend yields, has outperformed the average return delivered by peer pharmaceuticals and diagnostics companies by about 30%. We expect sales in both divisions to continue to grow faster than the market this year.’

In addition to Roche’s results for 2004, this year’s Annual General Meeting focused on the Basel research organisation. René Imhof, Head of Pharma Research at Roche Basel, emphasised the importance of Group headquarters for Roche as a whole: ‘Basel is a very attractive location for the Group, whether it be for research, development or production. Roche Basel has also proved that it can compete successfully with other Roche pharmaceutical research centres worldwide. We are currently working here on over 50 projects in metabolic and vascular diseases and diseases of the central nervous system. Moreover, around 200 of the roughly 1,200 researchers at Roche Basel also perform global functions for all of the Group’s research sites.’

A good example of the company’s successful research activities in Basel is the Roche Center for Medical Genomics (formerly the Basel Institute for Immunology) and its work on personalised medicine. Klaus Lindpaintner, Head of the Center, explained the significance of this line of research at the Meeting: ‘Personalised medicine studies the ways in which individuals respond to medicines and the reasons why responses vary from person to person. Our research into the genomic differences between individuals here in Basel will help us tailor our drugs better to the needs of specific patient populations. This means that, in future, we will be able to offer more targeted, effective treatment options, thereby creating added value for patients. And, last but not least, we will also be helping to make healthcare delivery as a whole more cost-efficient.’

About Roche
Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is one of the world’s leading research-focused healthcare groups in the fields of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. As a supplier of innovative products and services for the early detection, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, the Group contributes on a broad range of fronts to improving people’s health and quality of life. Roche is a world leader in diagnostics, the leading supplier of medicines for cancer and transplantation and a market leader in virology. In 2004 sales by the Pharmaceuticals Division totalled 21.7 billion Swiss francs, while the Diagnostics Division posted sales of 7.8 billion Swiss francs. Roche employs roughly 65,000 people in 150 countries and has R&D agreements and strategic alliances with numerous partners, including majority ownership interests in Genentech and Chugai.

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