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Corporate segment

The Corporate segment covers the non-operating activities supporting Shell. It comprises Shell’s holdings and treasury organisation, including its self-insurance activities as well as its headquarters and central functions. All finance expense and income as well as related taxes are included in the Corporate segment earnings rather than in the earnings of the business segments.

Treasury

The holdings and treasury organisation manages many of the Corporate entities and is the point of contact between Shell and the external capital markets. It is centralised in London and supported by regional centres in Singapore and Rio de Janeiro. Its daily operations include liquidity management, advising and financing subsidiaries and joint ventures, arranging the efficient investment of any surplus funds, transacting foreign exchange and managing Shell’s bank account infrastructure.

The treasury organisation maintains Shell’s credit ratings and debt platforms, issues short- and long-term capital-market instruments and executes the Royal Dutch Shell dividend, scrip and share buyback programmes.

Headquarters and central functions

Shell headquarters in The Hague, The Netherlands (photo)
Shell headquarters in The Hague,
the Netherlands.

Headquarters and central functions provide services to the businesses (Upstream Americas, Upstream International, Downstream) as well as other functions. They also provide support for Shell’s shareholder-related activities. The services they provide cover the areas of finance, human resources, legal advice, information technology, real estate, communications, health, security and government relations. They also assist the Chief Executive Officer and the Executive Committee.

The central functions have been increasingly supported by business service centres located around the world. These centres process transactions, manage data and produce statutory reports, among other services.

The majority of the headquarters and central-function costs are recovered from the business segments. Those costs that are not recovered are retained in Corporate.

Risk and insurance

Staff at Shell’s office in Port Harcourt, Nigeria (graph)
Staff at Shell’s office in Port Harcourt,
Nigeria.

At Shell, we use robust methodologies and processes to assess, mitigate and manage risk to drive down its total cost. This includes the valuation of risk so that it can be properly taken into account in decision-making. It also requires the causes of losses to be analysed and understood so that losses can be reduced in the future. To support this, Shell’s insurable risks are mainly aggregated and retained within insurance subsidiaries, which means that Shell self-insures most of its risk exposure. The insurance subsidiaries form a key part of Shell’s approach to risk management. They provide insurance coverage to Shell entities, up to $1.65 billion per event and usually limited to Shell’s percentage interest in the relevant entity. The type and extent of the coverage is equal to that which is otherwise commercially available in the third-party insurance market.