Chairman's Statement: How to Write the Annual Report Opening Letter

For a page or two of prose with no numbers in it, the chairman’s statement carries a strange amount of weight. It is usually the first thing a shareholder reads, and the impression it leaves colors how the rest of the report is received. A statement that sounds like one specific chairman talking candidly about one specific year earns attention and trust the financial statements then have to live up to. A templated statement quietly costs the report credibility before anyone has absorbed a single figure. That trade is rarely worth it, and it is almost always avoidable.

This guide explains what a chairman’s statement is, what it should cover, how to structure it block by block, and where the common failure modes sit. The governance context throughout is drawn from the SGX rules and the Code of Corporate Governance. Read it alongside our guide to annual reports and sustainability reports for Singapore companies and our deeper look at what to include in a Singapore annual report for the full reporting picture.

A note on scope. Walk Production is an integrated creative agency that writes and designs annual reports for listed companies and organizations across Singapore and Asia-Pacific. Our own team does the writing and the design. Sustainability consulting is available in addition, with the consultant on the project appointed by you or drawn from our partner panel. Audit, independent assurance, and legal advice fall outside our scope and stay with your appointed providers. This guide is about how to write and present the chairman’s statement well. Confirm your reporting obligations against the current official sources cited below.

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

A chairman’s statement is the board’s opening letter to shareholders, written in the chairman’s voice. Under SGX Mainboard Rule 708, it must provide a balanced and readable summary of the issuer’s performance and prospects, representing the collective view of the board. Where any director dissents, that view must be disclosed in the annual report. Always confirm the current rule text on the SGX Rulebook before sign-off.

That phrase, “collective view of the board”, is the part worth holding onto. The chairman is not offering a personal column. The statement is the board’s account of the year, delivered through one person, which is why it can carry weight a CEO’s marketing copy cannot.

The chairman’s statement is distinct from the CEO or managing director’s review. The chairman speaks for the board: strategy, oversight, and direction. The CEO review speaks for management: execution, segment performance, and operational priorities. The two work best as separate voices, and the reason they are two voices at all is structural rather than editorial, which is the point the governance section below picks up.

In the annual report sequence, the chairman’s statement usually opens the narrative section, after the corporate information pages and any financial highlights spread. It is the reader’s first substantive encounter with the board’s thinking, which makes the opening paragraph carry more weight than any other passage in the document.

What should a chairman’s statement include?

A strong chairman’s statement covers four things: an honest read on the year, the financial result framed against the strategy the board set, the board’s response to challenges, and a forward view of the next twelve to thirty-six months. It speaks for the board, not management.

The table sets the skeleton, but the difference between a good statement and a boilerplate one lives inside the heavier blocks. Take each in turn.

The financial headline is where most statements either earn trust or lose it. A boilerplate version says the company “delivered a resilient performance against a challenging backdrop”. A credible version names the movement and the reason in the same breath: revenue up, and the part of the strategy that drove it. A reader who skims only this paragraph should leave knowing the headline number and the single strategic factor behind it, because that pairing is what the rest of the report then has to substantiate.

The governance and risk note is the block most often filled with air. “The board maintained close oversight of the company’s risk profile throughout the year” tells a reader nothing. A line that points to a specific risk the board actually engaged with during the year does the work: a banking covenant the board monitored through a refinancing, a customer concentration that narrowed when a major account renewed, a cyber incident the board reviewed and responded to. Naming a real risk signals an active board. Asserting oversight in the abstract signals the opposite.

The sustainability connection has shifted from a courtesy line to a board-level point in the Singapore regime, which is why it gets its own section further down. For the include list, the test is the same as for governance: does the sentence describe how climate sits in the board’s thinking, or does it gesture at “our commitment to sustainability” without saying what the board actually considered?

Under SGX Practice Note 7.4, the Operating and Financial Review guide, issuers may incorporate some of that OFR discussion within the chairman’s statement or the CEO statement. In practice this means the chairman’s statement often carries a brief performance bridge before the fuller analytical review follows in a later section. The next section shows how that plays out on the page. Always confirm the current scope of Practice Note 7.4 with your advisers.

How do you structure the opening letter, paragraph by paragraph?

Open by characterizing the year in one or two sentences, then move from result to strategy to outlook. A reliable order runs: year framing, financial headline, strategic context, governance and risk, sustainability connection, outlook, and a short close to stakeholders.

Here is a skeleton a drafting team can reuse, with the purpose of each block stated for the writer.

1. Year framing (1 paragraph). Name the year without hedging. “FY 2024 was the first full year of our regional expansion program” anchors the reader immediately. Avoid vague openers about a “challenging environment”.
2. Financial headline (1 paragraph). State the result, then explain the reason. A reader who only skims this paragraph should leave knowing the headline number and the strategic factor behind it.
3. Strategic context (1 to 2 paragraphs). Connect the result to the strategy the board set at the start of the cycle. Did the year validate the direction, require a correction, or surface a new priority? This is where the chairman’s statement earns its distinction from the CEO review: board assessment of strategy, not management’s account of execution.
4. Governance and risk (1 paragraph). Note how the board oversaw principal risks, with a real example rather than a claim of oversight in general.
5. Sustainability connection (1 paragraph). Reference how climate and ESG matters feature in the board’s thinking. Confirm the current timeline on ACRA’s sustainability reporting requirements page before citing specific dates. The SGX Practice Note 7.6 Sustainability Reporting Guide sets out the expected structure for listed issuers.
6. Outlook (1 paragraph). The board’s view of the period ahead, stated with appropriate candor. Vague optimism is the single easiest way to undermine everything that came before.
7. Close (2 to 3 sentences). Short thanks to staff, management, and shareholders. A close that names a real accomplishment reads better than a formulaic thank-you paragraph.

The financial headline block deserves a closer look, because Practice Note 7.4 makes the chairman’s statement a legitimate home for a short performance bridge. A performance bridge is one paragraph: the result stated plainly, plus the strategic reason for it, handing off to the fuller Operating and Financial Review later in the report. The point is to give the headline once, cleanly, then let the OFR carry the detail without the two passages repeating each other.

In practice it reads like this. The chairman’s statement says: “Group revenue rose 9 percent to a record level, driven mainly by the first full-year contribution from the regional distribution network commissioned in FY 2023.” That is the bridge. The OFR then does the analytical work the chairman’s statement should not: the segment split, the margin movement, the working-capital effect, the capital allocation behind the network. The reader meets the number once in the opening letter and again, in depth, where it belongs.

There is a reason not to bury the headline. Practice Note 7.4 frames the OFR as disclosure that should let a reader compare the company across periods and against others in the same industry. A chairman’s statement that hides the result inside strategy talk works against that comparability, because the one figure a reader needs to track year on year is the one the opening letter has obscured. Confirm the current scope of Practice Note 7.4 with your advisers before relying on where the OFR content sits.

How long should a chairman’s statement be, and what tone works?

The working range is one to two report pages, often around 600 to 1,000 words. The tone is calm, candid, and specific: acknowledge what went wrong, frame the result against strategy, and avoid both spin and false modesty. It should read as one chairman speaking, not a template filled in by committee.

The length reasoning is practical. The chairman’s statement is read by shareholders who are also reading an entire annual report, so brevity protects authority. A statement that runs to three pages loses readers before the outlook section, which is often the most consequential passage. Let the report’s design carry emphasis, through pull quotes and key figures, rather than packing it all into the prose.

Tone ties directly to Rule 708’s requirement for a balanced and readable summary. A templated statement costs the report credibility, as the opening of this guide argued, and in this regime candor is not just good style. It is the standard the rule is written to. A statement that glosses over a difficult result, or uses strategy talk to avoid the actual numbers, is harder to defend as “balanced”. The most credible chairman’s statements name the year’s real inflection points rather than retreating into abstraction.

How should a Singapore chairman’s statement reflect governance and risk?

In Singapore the chairman leads the board, so the statement should reflect board oversight rather than operational detail. Reference how the board set and reviewed strategy, how it oversees principal risks, and how climate and sustainability matters now feature in the board’s thinking.

There is a governance design point underneath this, and it explains why the chairman’s statement and the CEO review are two voices in the first place. Under Provision 3.1 of the 2018 Code of Corporate Governance, the role of the chairman is to lead and ensure the effectiveness of the board, and the chairman and the chief executive should in principle be separate persons. So the separation of the two letters is not an editorial preference a drafting team is free to ignore. It mirrors a separation the Code builds into the company itself: the chairman leads the board that sets and oversees strategy; the CEO leads the management that executes it. When the two opening letters blur into one voice, they are quietly contradicting the governance structure they are supposed to express. Confirm the current Code text before relying on the provision number.

Where a company does combine the roles, or where the chairman and CEO are not separate persons, that is handled under the Code’s comply-or-explain approach: the company explains the variation and how its safeguards keep board oversight effective. The opening letters should still keep the board-voice and management-voice distinction visible, because the variation changes who holds the two roles, not the fact that there are two roles to speak for. A combined-role company that lets its opening letters merge into a single voice loses the one signal that reassures a reader the oversight function is still operating.

This is also where the “two letters, one voice” failure usually starts. It is most common when the chairman and CEO draft their sections without an editorial brief separating scope. Draft each letter against its own brief, board strategy and oversight on one side, operational execution on the other, then read them against each other before either is finalized.

Practically, the collective-board point means the statement has to do more than assert oversight. The board, through the chairman, is telling shareholders how it exercised its responsibilities during the year. That asks for at least a sentence or two on how the board engaged with the year’s key risks, and an acknowledgment of how the board’s strategy shaped management’s priorities. One detail from Rule 708 is worth keeping in mind here: if any director dissents from the view expressed in the chairman’s statement, that dissent must be disclosed in the annual report. In our experience drafting opening letters, this is rarely triggered, but it is a reminder that the statement carries the full weight of the board’s collective authority.

How does the chairman’s statement connect to the climate story?

In the current Singapore regime, climate has become board-level narrative, so the chairman’s statement is the natural place to signal that the board oversees climate as part of strategy. The aim is to signal oversight, not to reproduce the sustainability report. One or two sentences in the opening letter, with the detail living in the climate disclosure, is the right weight.

Under the phased climate reporting roadmap set by SGX RegCo and ACRA, climate-related disclosure has moved from one section of an ESG report toward the spine of the reporting exercise. The shift reaches the opening letter because a reader now expects the board to speak to climate risk directly, in the same place it speaks to strategy. A line that frames climate as a board-level strategic consideration, rather than a sustainability-team responsibility, is what an experienced reader looks for.

Keep it light. The chairman’s statement points to the board’s oversight; the sustainability report does the work of disclosure. Our Singapore reporting guide covers the climate timeline, the ISSB-aligned disclosures, and the four-pillar governance demands in full, and that is the place for the detail, not the opening letter. Confirm the current timeline on ACRA’s sustainability reporting page before citing specific years or thresholds, because the dates have been revised before.

What are the most common chairman’s statement mistakes?

The biggest mistakes are a generic letter that fits any company, strategy talk that never connects to the result, a chairman’s voice that blurs into the CEO review, an outlook so hedged it says nothing, and a tough year glossed over. Each one quietly costs the report credibility.

The most subtle of these is the over-edited statement. A first draft often has a recognizable voice, and then each reviewer rounds off an edge until what is left could have been signed by anyone. The fix is editorial discipline rather than fewer reviewers: agree which lines carry the chairman’s voice and protect them, so the review tightens the argument without sanding off the person.

How do you write a chairman’s statement when the year was difficult?

Lead with the result without euphemism, name what went wrong, then explain the board’s response and path forward. A candid statement in a hard year builds more trust than an upbeat one, and it meets the balanced standard SGX expects. The method follows four steps.

1. Acknowledge the result honestly. State the headline number, even if it is a decline. Readers know the financials are in the report; a chairman’s statement that avoids them signals evasion.
2. Contextualize against strategy. Was the result the expected cost of a strategic transition? An external shock? A performance shortfall? The board’s assessment of the reason matters more than the number alone.
3. Show the board’s response. What corrective actions did the board approve or initiate? This is where governance becomes concrete: the board sets the direction for recovery rather than overseeing in the abstract.
4. Set a realistic outlook. The close should name one or two things the board expects to change and one or two it is watching. Vague reassurance is worse than no outlook at all.

Step two carries most of the weight, because the same decline can be two completely different stories depending on the board’s read of it. Consider a 12 percent revenue drop. Framed as a planned transition cost, it reads: “Revenue fell 12 percent as we deliberately exited the lower-margin distribution contracts flagged at last year’s strategy review; the board accepted this near-term reduction to lift group margin from FY 2025.” Framed as an external shock, the same figure reads: “Revenue fell 12 percent, principally on a sharp contraction in our largest export market in the second half, a movement outside the plan the board set at the start of the year.” Both are candid. But the first tells a reader the decline was chosen and is on track, while the second tells a reader the board was caught out and is now responding. The number is identical; the credibility of the letter turns on which story is true and whether the board says so plainly.

The contrast between spin and candor is easy to illustrate. “Despite a challenging external environment, the board remains confident in the company’s long-term trajectory” says nothing specific and earns no credit. “Revenue declined 12 percent against a weaker domestic market; the board approved an overhead restructuring in Q3 and expects the cost base to reflect this from H1 next year” is concrete, credible, and aligned with the SGX balanced-and-readable standard.

How Walk Production can help

Walk Production is an integrated creative agency that writes and designs annual reports for listed companies and organizations across Singapore and Asia-Pacific. Our in-house copywriters draft chairman’s statements and CEO reviews that read as two distinct voices, shaped to the chairman’s register and grounded in the year’s actual story. Our designers then set the letter to a professional standard, with pull quotes, key figures, and layout designed to carry the emphasis the prose has earned.

Our annual report design service covers the full production cycle: concept development, report copywriting, layout, interactive PDF, and print-ready handoff, with pre-AGM support as needed. Our annual report copywriting team works across the opening letter, the financial review, the sustainability narrative, and the full document, under one account team. Browse our work to see recent annual reports across sectors, including our annual report for Baiduri Bank, a bank, or contact our editorial team to talk through your next reporting cycle.