President’s Message
President's Message
April 21, 2010


To our Stockholders, Customers & Friends:

2009 was a good year for the Varilease companies. We were very successful in carrying out our business plan for the year in an environment that was extremely challenging for our industry. I would like to share a few highlights with you:

  1. Total company lease originations were approximately $175,000,000.
  2. Consolidated pre-tax income increased again over the prior year.
  3. Overall liquidity more than doubled giving us excellent ability to fund our transactions.
  4. We significantly reduced our exposure in the small ticket (small business) leasing business as we felt the credit risk of current market transactions were not commensurate with yields.
  5. Varilease was once again honored by Monitor Magazine and ranked in the largest 100 leasing companies in the United States.
  6. Separately, last year we were also ranked 4th nationally in terms of privately held leasing companies…up from 9th in the prior year

Moving forward to 2010. . .

From our perspective 2010 will be a similar but perhaps slightly improved version of 2009. Our business plan for the first half of the year will essentially be a continuation of the same practices, policies, and credit standards that served us well in 2009. We are planning on quarterly business segment reviews beginning with the 3rd quarter to make determinations as to whether “it is time” to expand in certain market areas or look at new ones. US business volume is still down considerably from traditional levels and we see that continuing for quite a while. We continue to see new and increased opportunity that wasn't available to us in past years as a result of bank constrained liquidity, retrenched activity from the large finance companies, and the disappearance of a number of our competitors.

Our approach to the current market will be the same as it was in 2009….a continuation of conservative credit practices coupled with our healthy liquidity which enables us to structure sensible transactions for both our company and our customers.


Thank you once again for your continued support.

- Robert VanHellemont, CEO


Robert VanHellemont, CEO