About Barclays
Involved in banking for over 300 years, Barclays PLC is a major global financial services provider engaged in retail and commercial banking, credit cards, investment banking, wealth management and investment management services. We are one of the largest financial services companies in the world by market capitalisation. Operating in over 60 countries and employing over 120,000 people, we move, lend, invest and protect money for over 25 million customers and clients worldwide.
For the year ended 31st December 2005, the group achieved a pre-tax profit of £5,280 million, up fifteen per cent on 2004.
Barclays PLC has six major businesses:
UK Banking delivers banking products and services to over 14 million retail customers and 775,000 businesses in the UK.
Barclaycard is one of the leading credit card businesses in Europe, and has 17 million cards in issue.
Barclays Capital, the investment banking division, provides corporate, institutional and government clients with solutions to their financing and risk management needs.
Barclays Global Investors is one of the world’s largest asset managers and a leading provider of investment management products and services.
Wealth Management has over 580,000 affluent and high net worth clients.
International Retail and Commercial Banking is our global retail and commercial banking operation, with over 2 million international clients, in geographies which currently include the Caribbean, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Africa and the Middle East.
Strategy
Our aim is to position Barclays as one of the handful of universal banks that lead the global industry. Our portfolio of businesses makes this ambition legitimate: we're not totally reliant on any one geography, or any one customer segment.
Our four strategic priorities are to:
- Build the best bank in the UK
- Accelerate growth of global product businesses
- Develop retail and commercial banking activities in selected countries outside the UK
- Enhance operational excellence
We have made good progress in all the main elements of the Group's strategy, particularly our international growth plans. Our overall performance has demonstrated the benefits of our universal bank model and the diversification and growth characteristics of our mix of businesses. Our recent investment has been directed particularly at the global product businesses and International Retail and Commercial Banking.
In addition to organic growth, we continue to capture the benefits expected from recent acquisitions, including that of South African bank Absa, which is expected to contribute substantially to future earnings.
Barclays is delivering an excellent performance because we are doing exactly what we said we would.
- We are delivering good profit growth.
- We are benefiting from having a group of businesses which is integrated, but well spread.
- We have accelerated the pace of strategy execution because the strategy we have is a good one, and is working well.
- We have momentum.
