Primary Offices Established in Jackson, Miss.; Little Rock, Ark.; Hammond, La.

New Orleans, LA. – Entergy today announced that its corporate headquarters – displaced by Hurricane Katrina nearly eight months ago – will return to New Orleans. The company, headquartered in New Orleans since 1922, will also establish primary business offices in other locations to better align functional processes with business unit needs.

The majority of corporate employees will return to work at Entergy’s headquarters at 639 Loyola Avenue in New Orleans, some as early as next week. Others, including some with children attending out-of-town schools or who do not have a home to return to at the present time, will return later in the spring or early summer.

After Katrina struck August 29, most of the corporate center’s 1,500 employees and contractors were temporarily relocated to Clinton, Miss.; The Woodlands, Texas; Little Rock, Ark. and other cities.

“We are happy to be coming home and are energized about continuing to help rebuild the city and hope our decision—as disciplined as any we have ever made—will send a strong message the city is returning to its previous greatness,” said J. Wayne Leonard, Entergy’s chief executive officer. “Although we understand the intense interest in the headquarters decision, it’s important to note that even though our local utility, Entergy New Orleans, is currently in a bankruptcy proceeding due to the massive damage to the company’s infrastructure, Entergy workers have been in New Orleans and other parts of the region all along, responding to the devastation caused by Katrina and Rita in the communities we serve.”

In addition to the return of its corporate headquarters to New Orleans, Entergy announced that it will establish new primary office locations in Hammond, La., and Little Rock, Ark., to improve the functionality of its business processes and organizational design. Entergy is organized around a highly matrixed functional structure with business units such as Entergy New Orleans, Entergy Louisiana, Entergy Mississippi and others responsible for safety, service, reliability and profitability. Groups being partially relocated or dispersed include information processing, finance, accounting, transmission, distribution operations, customer service and human resources.

Leonard previously said the company would move beyond the outdated headquarters model with everyone in one city and one building. “We’re pleased that in the short term, and longer term, there will be new Entergy jobs in other cities in our region,” Leonard said. “Our friends in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, as well as Louisiana, showed before and after the hurricanes that they are good neighbors with good places to live in and do business. The new, distributed primary office locations that we will establish over an appropriate period of time will be as diverse and productive as the people and communities we serve.”

Leonard said, “We are always seeking opportunities to get decisions and decision-makers closer to the customer. The closer we are to a customer the better we can anticipate and meet their needs. We learned a lot over the past few months about how we can more effectively do business through digital technology and dispersed employees using real-time information. We are now institutionalizing those things we have learned through a formal organizational design.”

Entergy’s primary offices will include three that already exist. New Orleans, which in addition to corporate headquarters also will be the primary office location for the company’s utility operations division, will remain the largest of the offices. It also will remain the home of the Entergy New Orleans utility. The Woodlands, Texas, which now has the primary offices of Entergy’s System Planning and Fossil Fuel Operations, will add more jobs over time, particularly in finance services. Jackson, Miss., will eventually become more of an operations center, including the addition of certain transmission functions. Currently Jackson serves as the company’s nuclear headquarters in addition to headquarters for Entergy Mississippi.

The two new primary offices will include a back-office transaction center in Hammond, La., that will handle tasks like billing and remittance processing, and an information technology operations center in Little Rock, Ark. All five of the eventual primary location cities already have Entergy offices and are in the company’s four-state utility service area.

Leonard thanked employees for their loyalty and sacrifices during the eight-month wait for a decision. “Katrina changed everything for everyone. The company needed time to gather data and convert it to information that was appropriately framed for making the tough decisions and necessary trade-offs.

“When your business involves transmitting and delivering high-voltage electricity, splitting the atom, and providing instantaneous service of a non-storable product, you don’t have a margin for error. Safety and service come first,” he said. “People are Entergy’s most valuable asset, and we want to do our best to meet employees’ needs and preferences while making the right business decisions for owners, customers and other stakeholders.”

Leonard noted that in the New Orleans area and other parts of the company’s service area in the hurricane-affected region, there still are many factors impacting the redevelopment of New Orleans that are beyond Entergy’s control. “Good companies continually monitor their environment and make the best decisions possible with the information they have,” he said. “Entergy’s history has been to embrace change rather than ignore it, and we’ll keep doing that. This organizational structure provides considerable flexibility to meet whatever challenges we might face while maintaining business continuity. In New Orleans as in all the communities we serve, we will continue to do what is best for all of our stakeholders.”

Entergy Corporation is an integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations. Entergy owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, and it is the second-largest nuclear generator in the United States. Entergy delivers electricity to 2.7 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Entergy has annual revenues of more than $10 billion and approximately 14,000 employees.

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Entergy’s online address is www.entergy.com.