STRATEGY 23 the reporting year in Switzerland, in our asset management seg- ment, at Dresdner Bank and in France. Divesting subcritical  activities and risks with no corresponding profit opportunities is another key element of the “Three Plus One” program.  This element of our strategy, the “Plus One,” is our “On Top Fitness and Outperformance Program”. By that we mean the sustainable increase of our competitiveness and our company value beyond the usual parameters: by strengthening our core business, refining management instruments and accelerating profitable growth. The efficiency gains from the first three pro- gram components of “Three Plus One” are invested in business areas that are best suited to reaching these objectives. These can be individual markets, our sales organization or the sharp- ening of our customer focus. In the past decades, we have used openings in the market to build up a far-reaching international business portfolio. That made good sense, because such opportunities can vanish with unexpected speed. Now, we are subjecting this portfolio to a painstaking analysis with the objective of disposing of those in- terests which did not meet our original expectations.  The central concepts linked to this component are “Customer Satisfaction” and “Sales Culture”. The quality of our services and products, our marketing drives, our customer interfaces and the back office processes supporting them must all converge in one point: we want to be the consumer’s first choice and not compete on price alone. Our objective is to create life-long cus- tomer relations that are beneficial to both partners. By now, the number of disposals has reached 18. That freed up approximately 0.9 billion euros in risk capital and 1.9 billion euros in liquidity. But our primary concern is not just to free up risk capital; rather, we are striving for proximity to the customer and efficient management. We do not want to tie up valuable resources in businesses that offer no prospects of achieving our ambitious goal of sustainable profitable growth. In order to reinforce the entrepreneurial outlook of the com- pany, we have changed the process of capital allocation (more about this topic on page 25 of this Annual Report). The holding has now taken on the role of a capital market in which each op- erating unit competes for additional capital. And only those units that present the best business plans and can prove the highest creation of added value will qualify for more risk capi- tal. In keeping with this concept, we have reduced the volume of risk capital in those units of Dresdner Bank that are non- strategic or unprofitable, for example in the credit restructur- ing unit IRU and in the investment portfolio. Instead, this risk capital was allocated to segments that generated higher income. Overall, this redirection of capital resources has strengthened the profitability of Allianz and increased the normalized return on capital employed across all segments from 3.1 to 12.6 per- cent *) . The internal capital market thus created will enhance the entrepreneurial spirit of the entire organization, because it rewards those whose local strategies are successful with their customers while at the same time generating an attractive re- turn on investment. And that is very much in the interest of our shareholders. Down the line, the reduction of complexity will increase ef- ficiency, for example by pooling IT procurement worldwide. In the reporting year, we generated savings of about 55 million eu- ros from the part of our global purchasing volume analyzed thus far (160 million euros). That is 35 percent of the budget con- sidered. Increased efficiency and better service are also the ob- jectives of merging similar businesses or placing them under central control. Allianz Marine & Aviation and Allianz Risk Transfer, Mondial and Euler Hermes, as well as Allianz Global Risks, are units that were born of this logic. The reduction of complexity and the concomitant increase of earnings are also served by efficient synergy management. That is why last year we regrouped the units Allianz Knowledge Management, International Department Health, and Synergy Projects in “Allianz Group Business Services”. The mission of this Group Center is to support the operating units worldwide in increasing their earnings power through an even more tar- geted transfer of know-how, best practice exchanges, and the exchange of experts. We are convinced that this customer relations oriented ap- proach creates added value and secures the basis for sustainable profitable growth. That makes it the decisive vector for the im- plementation of the entire “Three Plus One” initiative, right up to our highest strategic objective: we want to be the leading in- ternational financial services provider for insurance, private pen- sions and asset management, we want to be the one company that people can really trust. *) In this calculation, investment income is determined by means of a normalized performance rate. We thereby smooth out the influence of fluctuations in the capital markets and of profit taking. At present, we are normalizing stock performance at 8.5 percent. Plus 1 Sustainable increase of our competitive strength and value 3 A leaner portfolio and reduction of complexity