Chairman's Statement: Writing the Opening Letter for UAE Annual Reports

The chairman’s statement is often the first thing a shareholder reads, and the one section of a UAE annual report that belongs to no template. It is a letter. It has a named author, a specific year, and a board’s view behind it. When it works, it anchors the whole report. When it does not, it reads as though it was written for any company in any year, and the reader carries that suspicion into everything that follows.

This article is about writing that letter well: what to put in it, how to structure it, how the UAE governance context shapes the container it sits inside, and how to handle the bilingual Arabic and English version many UAE issuers produce. It is aimed at communications and investor relations teams, company secretaries, and anyone briefing a chairman ahead of the annual reporting cycle.

A note on scope. Walk Production is an integrated creative agency that writes and designs annual reports for listed companies and organizations, with a track record across Malaysia and Singapore, and now serving the UAE market. The letter and the report around it are written and designed by our own team. Sustainability consulting is offered as well, with the consultant on the project appointed by you or drawn from our partner panel. We are not an audit, assurance, or legal firm, and independent assurance stays with your appointed providers. This article is about writing the letter clearly; always confirm your board-report and governance obligations against the current official sources cited below.

What is a chairman’s statement in a UAE annual report?

A chairman’s statement is the board’s opening letter in an annual report. It sets out the chairman’s view of the financial year, the strategy the board has set, and the direction ahead. In a UAE annual report, it forms part of the board of directors’ report that listed joint stock companies disclose under the Corporate Governance Guide (Decision No. 3/R.M of 2020), with oversight from the Capital Market Authority (CMA, formerly the Securities and Commodities Authority or SCA).

The Corporate Governance Guide is the container, not the wording. It frames what the board’s report has to cover and disclose; the chairman’s statement is where a named person gives that report a voice. That distinction matters for anyone briefing the chairman. The governance framework tells you the letter must exist and roughly what ground it sits over. Nothing in it writes the sentences for you, which is exactly why a templated statement wastes an opportunity without ever breaching a rule.

The statement is also distinct from the CEO or managing director’s review, which follows it and focuses on execution: segment performance, operating conditions, and priorities for the year ahead. The two letters answer different questions. The chairman speaks for the board. The CEO speaks for management. That clean division of labor is harder to hold under the 2025 governance reform discussed below, where one person may now hold both roles, but the editorial principle survives: the board’s view and management’s account should cover different ground rather than repeat each other.

Structurally, the statement sits early in the report: after the cover, corporate information, and financial highlights, and before the CEO review. Its position signals that the board has read and endorsed the year, not merely signed off the financial statements. This article is a copywriting guide about writing the letter well, not a compliance checklist; confirm your obligations with your advisers and the official CMA guidance.

What should a strong chairman’s statement include?

A strong chairman’s statement covers four things: an honest read of the year, the strategy behind the result, the board’s view of the operating environment, and a clear outlook. It speaks for the board, names real decisions, and avoids generic foreword language that would fit any issuer in any year.

The six building blocks are:

The quality that separates a strong statement from a merely compliant one is the willingness to name a real decision. A well-written statement reads as one chairman, at one company, in one year. That means naming the board decision behind a result, not just describing the result.

It is worth being clear about what this letter is from a production standpoint. Across the annual reports we have written and designed in Malaysia and Singapore, the chairman’s statement is the page that decides whether a reader trusts the rest of the document or skims past it as corporate wallpaper. It is copywriting and design work, not a compliance form, and it carries a disproportionate share of the report’s credibility for the few minutes most readers give the opening spread. Treating it as the last thing to draft, squeezed in after the financials close, is the surest way to waste that opening, and in a bilingual report it is also the surest way to leave no time for the second language to be written rather than translated.

How long should a chairman’s statement be, and how should it be structured?

Most chairman’s statements run roughly 600 to 1,200 words across one to two report spreads. Length is a judgment call against the report’s overall extent, the design grid, and how much strategic ground the board needs to cover. A 60-page annual report and a 180-page integrated report will size the chairman’s statement differently. In a bilingual report, remember the English word count is not the spread count: the same letter runs to a different length in Arabic and occupies two versions, so plan the extent around both.

A practical paragraph-by-paragraph skeleton:

1. Opening (one paragraph). The headline of the year: what defined the period for the board, stated plainly. Lead with the most important thing first.
2. Year in review (two to three paragraphs). What happened, why it happened, and the board’s read of it. Treat setbacks with the same care as successes.
3. Strategic context (two to three paragraphs). The decisions the board made and the rationale. This is where the statement earns its right to be read before the CEO review.
4. Governance and stewardship (one to two paragraphs). Board composition, committee work, key risk or ESG oversight decisions during the year, and, where relevant, the leadership structure the board has adopted.
5. Outlook (one paragraph). The board’s view of the year ahead, with enough specificity to be meaningful.
6. Acknowledgments and sign-off (short). The sign-off carries the chairman’s name, title, and date, written on behalf of the board. In a bilingual report, that name, title, and date have to be rendered consistently in both scripts, which is a detail teams routinely leave to the final proof and regret.

Lead with the headline, then the detail. A reader who puts the report down after the first paragraph should already know what the year meant.

How do UAE governance rules shape the chairman’s statement?

UAE governance rules set the disclosure container the chairman’s statement sits inside, not its wording. The Corporate Governance Guide (Decision No. 3/R.M of 2020) governs the board’s report and disclosure for listed joint stock companies. The chairman’s statement sits within that board-report structure as its narrative front.

Oversight of that framework moved during the current reform cycle. The regulator long known as the SCA was reconstituted as the Capital Market Authority under federal decree-laws issued in 2025, with the change taking effect from the start of 2026, and references to the SCA in existing rules are generally treated as references to the CMA. Because the institutional framework is changing, confirm the current name, remit, and rule text directly with the Capital Market Authority when you plan your cycle.

One timing point shapes the production calendar more than any other. The board’s report, within which the chairman’s statement sits, is generally expected to be disclosed before the annual general meeting, and listed-company reporting in the UAE is commonly planned around a 90-day window from the financial year-end. That is a reason to draft early in the cycle rather than at the end of it, and the reason is sharper for a bilingual issuer than a single-language one. The statement does not just have to be written inside that window; it has to survive a full translation and equal-treatment proofing round inside it as well. Brief the chairman at the start of the cycle, not after the financials close. Confirm the current filing deadlines and any exchange-specific timing directly with the Dubai Financial Market, ADX, and the CMA for your obligations.

Writing the statement under the 2025 combined-role reform

The reform with the most direct effect on the letter concerns who signs it. Under the SCA’s Chairman’s Board Resolution No. 24 of 2025, in effect from 26 August 2025, a listed company may combine the roles of board chairman and chief executive, where it previously had to keep them separate. The permission is conditional: the articles of association must allow it, shareholders must approve the arrangement by special resolution, at least three-quarters of the board must be independent, and the permanent board committees must meet their own independence safeguards. Conditions and thresholds change, so confirm the current requirements with the Capital Market Authority (formerly the SCA) and your advisers before signing off any disclosure on this point.

The copywriting consequence is the part worth dwelling on, because it is wholly distinct from the separated-role tradition. When the same person signs the statement as both chairman and chief executive, the letter itself becomes the place transparency is demonstrated. A combined-role statement that reads exactly like a separated-role one has skipped its main job. The stewardship paragraph should do four things on the page.

Name the arrangement plainly, rather than letting a reader infer it from a single signature line. Point to the basis for it: the special-resolution approval and the independent-majority board that the resolution requires. Show how independent oversight is maintained in practice, for instance through a lead independent director or the committee that reviews the dual role each year. And acknowledge the conflict safeguards directly, including that the chairman recuses from board votes on matters where the dual role creates a conflict, such as decisions on the chairman’s own remuneration or performance. A stewardship paragraph that references those facts turns a permission the company has taken up into a piece of governance the board is willing to be read on.

This is not advice on whether to combine the roles, which is a board and adviser decision. It is the writing point that follows once the decision is made. A letter signed by a combined chairman and chief executive carries more of the burden of demonstrating balance than a letter signed by a non-executive chairman, and the strongest examples meet that burden in the open rather than hoping no reader asks the question.

How do you write the bilingual Arabic and English chairman’s statement?

Write the chairman’s statement twice, once in Arabic and once in English. Neither version should begin life as a translation of the other. The bilingual chapters of our UAE annual and sustainability reports guide cover layout, typography, and proofing for the whole document. The letter is a special case within that, because it carries a named first-person voice that the rest of the report does not, and voice is the hardest thing to carry across two languages. Four principles are specific to the letter.

The chairman’s voice and register have to land at the same candor in both languages. A hedged admission in the English (“the second half tested the assumptions behind our investment plan”) relies on idiom and understatement that do not transfer word for word. The Arabic has to reach the same level of candor by its own route, which is a writing task, not a substitution task. Brief whoever produces the Arabic on the register you want, beyond just the source sentence, so a careful English admission does not harden into a blunt Arabic one, or soften into a vaguer one.

The named sign-off, title, and date must be rendered consistently in both scripts. The signature block is the most personal element in the report and the easiest to leave inconsistent. The chairman’s name, the exact form of the title, and the date have to match in meaning and form across the Arabic and English versions, checked against the company’s own usage rather than improvised at proof.

A pull-quote has to carry the chairman’s voice in both languages. Designers routinely lift a line from the statement as a spread pull-quote. If that line is written in English and then back-translated for the Arabic spread, the Arabic usually loses its cadence and betrays the English source. Choose the pull-quote knowing it has to work as a genuine line in each language, and write or adapt it accordingly.

Use a parallel layout because the statement is high-visibility front-matter. Placing both languages on the same opening spread carries weight for exactly this section, where seeing the two together signals that neither is the afterthought. The mechanics of parallel versus sequential layout sit in our guide to annual reports and sustainability reports for UAE companies and do not need repeating here; the point for the letter is that it is a strong candidate for the parallel treatment precisely because it opens the report.

One framing that holds across all four. Our team produces bilingual reports in Bahasa Malaysia and English, and the structural discipline carries to Arabic and English work: treat both languages as equal from the first brief, and write the second version rather than translate it. The scripts differ; the rigor that keeps a first-person voice intact across two of them is the same.

Connecting the bilingual letter to the numbers and the ESG story

The chairman’s statement is also where the board signals it owns the strategy-to-results thread, including the ESG story, which investors on the Dubai and Abu Dhabi markets now compare company against company. The IFRS Foundation’s connected information principle holds that investors value the connections between a company’s financial statements and its other investor-focused disclosures, including those on sustainability. The letter is the natural place to draw that thread at board level, linking the strategy set, the result delivered, and the ESG commitments behind it.

In a UAE report where ESG figures are increasingly disclosed as a defined metric set, that thread comes with a constraint. Any ESG figure or claim the chairman cites has to match the metric set elsewhere in the report exactly, and it has to read identically in Arabic and English. A chairman who quotes an emissions reduction or a board-independence ratio in the opening letter has, in effect, promoted that figure to the most-read page in the document; if it disagrees by a decimal with the data index, or differs between the two language versions, the inconsistency surfaces where it does the most damage. The metric-set detail sits in our ESG reporting in the UAE guide; for the letter, the rule is simpler. Cite a figure only if it is drawn from the same governed source as the rest of the report, and proof it in both languages.

What common mistakes weaken a chairman’s statement?

The most common failures are a generic letter that fits any company, strategy talk with no link to the result, a chairman voice that duplicates the CEO review, hollow optimism with no setbacks, and bilingual versions that drift apart in tone or figures.

The bilingual failure mode is the one a single-language report cannot have, and it is worth more than a table row. It happens when the Arabic version is treated as a derivative of the English source rather than an equal version: the English is written, edited, and re-edited through the board’s revisions, and the Arabic is translated once and then quietly falls behind, drifting in tone as the English sharpens and, more dangerously, drifting in figures as late edits change a number on one side only. The fix has three parts that work together. Lock a single source of figures that both versions draw from, so no number lives in two places. Brief a transcreation rather than a literal translation, so the Arabic carries the chairman’s register. And review each version in its own right, by a reader fluent in that language, rather than checking the Arabic only against the English. Done together, these keep the two versions equal under the pressure of late board edits, which is exactly when they tend to come apart.

One further failure appears more often now than five years ago: over-edited statements that strip out the chairman’s voice in the name of polish. The result is a letter nobody appears to have written, full of correct sentences and no discernible person. The readers who matter most, the investors and analysts working through the report line by line, are the ones who register the absence. Edit for specificity and voice first, polish second.

A chairman’s statement worked example: before and after

The rewrite below shows the same opening done two ways. The example uses an invented, generic issuer; no real UAE client is named or implied.

The rewrite names a board decision, connects it to a result, discloses the context that made the decision necessary, and carries a genuine forward commitment. The chairman’s voice is present, not buffed away. Two production notes follow from it. The 23 percent and the 38 percent must match the segment figures in the financial review exactly, drawn from the same source. And both figures, and the candor of “proved correct”, have to read the same way in the Arabic version, which is where the transcreation brief and the locked source earn their place.

How Walk Production can help

Walk Production writes and designs annual reports for listed companies and organizations, with a track record across Malaysia and Singapore, and now serving the UAE market. Our in-house team handles annual report copywriting, the chairman’s statement, bilingual production, and annual report design under one account team, so the letter and the document it opens are built together from the first brief.

The most useful early step is to brief the chairman and plan the bilingual structure before design begins. Drafting early in the cycle, from a brief that names the year’s real decisions and the board’s leadership structure, is where the strongest chairman’s statements start, and it is the only way a bilingual letter gets written twice rather than translated once.

To see the wider reporting context the chairman’s statement sits inside, read our guide to annual reports and sustainability reports for UAE companies and what to include in a UAE annual report and how to structure it. Browse our work, including our annual report for Swift Haulage Berhad, a listed logistics group, one of the reports in our Malaysia and Singapore portfolio, or talk to us about the reporting cycle ahead.