About two-thirds of its sales are attributable to multiyear maintenance, repair and operations contracts, with an average annual retention rate for these contracts since 2000 running at 95%.

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Corporate Executive Board, for one, signs annual contracts with job sites, but overall, the firm tends to spread its resources among many sites, says Eric Coffey, head of corporate recruiting.

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In general, after high-loss years, reinsurers are able to push for rate increases, but because overall losses were moderate in 2012, rates are expected to remain largely stable when the annual contracts come up for renewal this year, reinsurers themselves have cautioned.

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Many civil service contracts require annual pay increases for staff, in line with their seniority and length of service.

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Workers lucky enough to belong to a big-company union that negotiated its annual wage contracts along with those of workers for other big firms in the same industry tended to do better than average.

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But Boeing has offered to make potential spillover contracts more transparent by filing an annual report on them to the Europeans for approval.

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Such payments would secure government contracts for Mr. Azimi's travel business to take Muslims on the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Afghan and U.S. officials say.

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The company hopes that military contracts will help it emerge from bankruptcy and in the future account for 10% of its annual sales, says Malden spokesman David Costello.

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