About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
Careers
About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
Careers
Our purpose is to provide safe, nutritious and affordable food, and clothing that is great value for money. It defines our culture and values, informing our Group strategy, which is realised through our business strategies and is delivered by our operating model.
As a Group, we have a clear sense of our social purpose. We work hard to provide safe, nutritious and affordable food and good quality, affordable clothing to millions of customers worldwide every day. Only if we do these things well should we make a profit.
Across all of our businesses, we live and breathe our values through the work we do every day, from how we drive our strategies, how we invest and how we deliver for our customers and consumers. It is also how we approach sustainability, with a focus on outcomes.
Our people are key to driving the necessary innovation and implementing the action required. It is only through their skills and capability that we will make necessary and timely progress. Our employees tend to stay with us for a long time, building exciting careers that help them fulfil their goals at work, at home and in the community.
We believe that most people are inherently good and that with encouragement, engagement and support they will do the right thing in the right way. Our high standards of integrity enable us to drive a strong culture, recognising that acting responsibly is the only way to build and manage a business over the long term.
We pride ourselves on being a first-class employer, working actively to develop our people and create opportunities for progression.
Our businesses thrive on the diversity of their people, so we are investing in programmes to help remove barriers to talent.
We want to attract, recruit and retain the best people, ensuring they are stimulated by the jobs they do and equipped with the skills they need to succeed.
Our Group strategy is to drive sustainable, long-term growth and cash generation across our portfolio of food and retail businesses to create value for shareholders and other stakeholders.
We take a long-term, patient investment approach to create sustainable growth. We aim to build and acquire long-duration growth businesses that will create value and deliver strong returns.
Our portfolio of clothing retail and food businesses is well positioned for long-term growth through a focus on categories and sectors with resilient market fundamentals and geographies with favourable demographics. We select opportunities where we can create a competitive advantage to build leadership or niche market positions, typically in moderate-scale categories. Our investment decisions are influenced by strategic patience and we believe our highly diversified portfolio, across different business activities and geographies, enables discipline and creates breadth in our opportunities for growth. We have designed a devolved operational leadership model that effectively manages the breadth, mix and long-term nature of our businesses.
Our businesses are typically highly cash generative, which enables continuous reinvestment. We are investing in our well-established, growth-engine businesses to drive expansion into new markets and adjacencies, while nurturing a substantial portfolio of smaller, early-stage businesses which have the potential to be the next generation of long-duration growth drivers. Our ability to invest is strengthened by having several mature, lower-growth businesses within the Group that continue to deliver good profitability and cash generation.
Across our portfolio, we are investing to accelerate growth through effective marketing, innovative new product development and enhanced digital and technology capabilities. This is underpinned by continuous investment to expand our manufacturing capacity and add new capabilities. We are also investing to deliver our ESG priorities based on the most material risks, opportunities and impacts to the Group. In particular, this includes decarbonisation and social factors within our supply chains. We supplement organic growth with investment in value-creating acquisitions that bring new opportunities and capabilities. We make disposals when judged to be the best route to creating shareholder value.
Our investment approach is grounded in conservative financial management and we maintain a resilient balance sheet. This ensures long-term financial stability and creates the flexibility to fund opportunities as they arise. Our disciplined approach to capital allocation, using risk-adjusted hurdle rates, drives strong returns on capital.
We employ a devolved operating model across our Retail, Grocery, Ingredients, Sugar and Agriculture businesses.
We believe the best way to create enduring value involves setting objectives from the bottom up rather than the top down. We make operational decisions locally, because in our experience decisions are most successful when made and owned by the people with the best understanding of their customers and markets.
The Group, or corporate centre, provides a framework for the sharing of ideas and best practice and is in constant dialogue with the people who run our businesses, giving our corporate leaders a comprehensive overview of their material opportunities and risks, enabling collaboration.
