About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
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.
Primark is a fast-growing, international value retailer with a differentiated customer proposition delivered through a digitally-enabled, store-led model. It has significant white space to continuously expand its store footprint in existing and new markets.
We win with customers through our strong brand, known for unbeatable prices and great quality essential clothing and fashion. We target a wide customer base across women’s, men’s and kidswear and we are building strong positions in categories such as home and beauty. We continuously evolve our ranges to meet customer needs, including through collaborations and licensing partnerships. The execution of our strategy in each market is adapted to reflect the size of the white space opportunity, the maturity of the store portfolio and local customer needs.
We aim to offer a unique store experience by finding the right spaces in the right locations and creating exciting retail destinations. We also use effective digital customer engagement as a key driver of footfall, including our website, stock checker and increasingly Click & Collect, and social media platforms.
We work to maintain an ethical and responsible supply chain, and we focus on driving efficiencies and cost savings across our supply chain, store portfolio and central operations. We target strong financial returns and cash generation
Our strategy is to drive sustainable growth across our large and diverse portfolio of both international brands and regionally-focused businesses. We will continue to deliver growth organically and through carefully selected acquisitions.
Our international brands, Twinings, Ovaltine, Patak’s, Blue Dragon, Jordans and Mazzetti, have a long runway for growth. Our focus is on reaching new consumers in existing markets, expanding into new markets and broadening our offering through new product development. We are investing in effective marketing and innovation to drive category growth and build market share. We benefit from our centralised manufacturing footprint for these brands.
In our regionally-focused businesses in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand, our focus is on driving strong cash generation over the long term. We adopt bespoke strategies to win in local markets. This includes investing in marketing to maintain brand health and support our strong local market positions.
Our strategy is to drive sustainable growth in Ingredients within focused categories, including yeast, bakery ingredients, enzymes, precision extraction, health and nutrition and pharmaceutical delivery systems.
In our yeast and bakery ingredients business, AB Mauri, we are growing our portfolio of products for industrial, craft and retail bakers in our well-established regions of the Americas, Europe and Asia. Our focus is on consistent delivery and innovation for new and existing customers. This is underpinned by strong, insight-led investment in the development of new technologies and ingredients that will meet the changing needs of our customers in different local markets.
Our individual country businesses are dedicated to their local markets, backed by global expertise in bakery products, technologies and know-how. We are also expanding our portfolio of speciality yeast products and technologies for other industries, including alcoholic beverages.
In our specialty ingredients portfolio, ABFI, we are using science and technology to create value-added, innovative speciality ingredients to serve the food and beverage, health and nutrition and pharmaceutical industries, as well as markets such as animal feed and certain industrial segments. Our strategic focus is on niche categories where we can have a differentiated proposition using platforms such as enzymes and other industrial biotechnology, precision extraction and synthetic chemistry. As well as building on these platforms, we are broadening our geographical exposure to our focused markets.
We will continue to grow both through acquisitions and organically, including geographical expansion, innovation and new applications.
Our strategy is to drive sustainable long-term growth in Africa, building on our strong market positions, while delivering good returns in our European businesses over the cycle.
In our African markets, particularly Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, growth in sugar consumption is expected to be driven by both population and economic growth. We have strong, attractive consumer brands and continue to build effective routes to market. We are investing to add production capacity in our growth markets, such as Tanzania and Zambia. We also continue to improve our operational effectiveness and strengthen our agricultural practices, which will help to increase cane yields and reduce the impact from severe weather conditions. Over time, we have opportunities to expand our portfolio of co-products, such as potable alcohol and electricity. We are investing to deliver our ESG priorities, which include sustainable agricultural practices as well as social factors.
In Europe, our strategy is to deliver good profitability and cash flow generation through the cycle. We do this through long-term customer relationships, which are built on the high quality of our products and the security of our supply. We also see opportunities to grow our portfolio of co-products, drive continuous operational efficiencies and to use data and technology to improve yields and profitability for our growers. We continue to invest in the delivery of our ESG priorities, in particular our decarbonisation programme.
Our strategy is to build value-added agri-food businesses on the foundation of our experience in our commoditised feed business. We will continue to grow organically and through acquisition.
We are expanding our portfolio of innovative, speciality feed ingredients, including feed enzymes and additive products, which we sell globally. We are also growing our integrated dairy business in the UK, connecting data, services and products in new ways, to provide insights to help our customers improve dairy farm performance. We continue to strengthen our position as a market leader in premix and compound animal feed in the UK and China.
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.
