Recovering from the tragedy of 9/11 — facing our future with a renewed sense of purpose and confidence — we began to realize our vision for Merrill Lynch...disciplined, agile and accountable.

Over the past 12 months, we have built on the restructuring initiated at the end of 2001, aggressively controlled expenses, diversified revenues, and liberated resources to invest in our future. We have resized our company and reshaped it into a portfolio of diversified businesses to deliver superior client service and shareholder value, across economic cycles. We rededicated ourselves to a performance-based culture, grounded in excellence and integrity. The success of these efforts is reflected in our results.

We made some tough calls about how we saw the shape of the markets and our businesses in the years ahead. The equity markets had suffered a large-scale, downward adjustment. Future growth would be incremental to this new, greatly reduced base. We had to diversify revenues and align our capacity with the post-bubble marketplace.

We reevaluated our investments in a number of regions, including Canada, Japan, South Africa and Australia, and reshaped our core businesses for the new environment. This process involved some painful decisions; cutting costs is never easy. Personally, I feel confident that the story developing at Merrill Lynch will be not about cost cuts — but about opportunities created.