About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
Our way of operating – entrepreneurial but also financially prudent and focused on the long term – has achieved growth over many years and creates long-term value for our shareholders and other stakeholders alike.
We take a long-term view to create long-term value for our shareholders, business partners, employees and the communities in which we operate. Our strategy is to achieve sustainable growth over the long term and the Group balance sheet is managed to ensure long-term financial stability, regardless of the state of the capital markets. We are committed to increasing shareholder value through sound commercial and responsible business decisions that deliver steady growth in earnings and dividends.
Our ownership structure provides us with the stability to invest in businesses that we believe in and to support the growth of those businesses over the long term. Our growth has been mostly organic, achieved through investment in marketing, development of existing and new products and technologies, and through targeted capital expenditure to improve efficiency and expand capacity. Acquisitions are carefully selected to complement existing business activities and exploit opportunities in adjacent markets or geographies; disposals are made when judged the best route to creating shareholder value.
Our long-established, disciplined approach to capital investment underpins our growth. We manage our balance sheet to provide the headroom necessary to fund long-term investment and we make funding available to all our businesses, providing that analysis of their investment proposals proves sound and the financial returns meet or exceed a set of clearly defined criteria. We believe that this approach, coupled with a rigorous commitment to ethical conduct and sustainable business practice, is the best way to create enduring value for all our stakeholders.
The Group’s majority shareholder is Wittington Investments Limited, a privately owned company which in turn is majority owned by the Garfield Weston Foundation. The Foundation is one of the UK’s leading grant-making charitable institutions and is mainly funded by the dividends from Associated British Foods. The returns we generate therefore matter not only for shareholders, but also to many charities. In its last financial year to 5 April 2023, the Foundation donated £90m to around 2,000 charities across the UK and in the 65 years since the Foundation was created it has disbursed more than £1.5bn in grants.
We understand the value of good people, strong and accountable teams, the power of brands, the need for continuous investment and the need to maintain strong and enduring relationships with customers and suppliers.
Across all our businesses, we live and breathe our values through the work we do every day, from investing in the health and safety of our colleagues, to promoting diversity and inclusion and respecting human rights. Our values are: respecting everyone’s dignity; acting with integrity; progressing through collaboration; and delivering with rigour.
We pride ourselves on being a first-class employer, working actively to develop our people and create opportunities for progression. As a result, 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.
Our Group strategy is to create long-term value for our shareholders and other stakeholders alike.
Our strategy is to achieve sustainable growth over the long term, increasing shareholder value through sound commercial and responsible business decisions that deliver steady growth in earnings and dividends. Our ownership structure provides us with the stability to invest in businesses that we believe in and to support the growth of those businesses over the long term. Our ESG agenda is shaped by the leaders within each business who are closest to the opportunities and risks. ESG factors are not only taken into account within business strategy, they are put into effect by people at every level of the Group who are trusted and empowered to exercise good judgement.
Our Grocery businesses are founded on a set of strong brands with leading positions in many markets worldwide.
For our international brands such as Twinings, Ovaltine, Patak’s, Blue Dragon and Jordans, we focus on investing in brand equity and employ regional strategies to drive growth.
We also have a series of more regional brands that are market specific, such as Tip Top bakery in Australia, Mazola vegetable oils in the US, and Kingsmill in the UK, where we seek out leading market positions in the relevant domestic markets.
For most of our brands we have our own end-to-end manufacturing capability which is critical in supporting new product development and operational excellence that drives our brand proposition.
Our Ingredients businesses enable or enhance the production of food and other products.
AB Mauri manufactures and sells yeast and ingredients of a consistently high quality to the baking industry. We operate globally and have strong market positions in the Americas, Europe, and south and south east Asia. Through our Global Technology Centre in the Netherlands we invest in innovation to generate opportunities for growth. ABF Ingredients develops and manufactures specialty ingredients for the food, health and nutrition, pharmaceutical, animal health and industrial sectors. We focus on high-value niches and are differentiated by our technology, product quality and customer-centric culture. The breadth and low cyclicality of our products, customer base and applications provide commercial resilience. Our strategy is for growth both through acquisitions and organically through geographical expansion, innovation and new applications.
AB Agri is an international agri-food business and a leader in the UK.
We supply farm performance services, animal feed, speciality ingredients and supplements to farms, feed manufacturers, food producers and retailers.
Our growth strategy sets out opportunities to strengthen our position in current markets, expand into new geographies, connect data and technology in new ways to deliver on-farm performance and build on our established position of strength in the dairy industry.
ABF Sugar has a portfolio of attractive positions, generally in deficit markets which are somewhat insulated from the volatile world sugar price by local supply and demand conditions.
We have significant opportunities to grow profits by continuing our efforts to become truly customer-led, by driving further efficiency and building out our co-products portfolio, all whilst working to reduce our water, carbon and electricity usage.
Our African sugar businesses are building attractive consumer brands and effective routes to market that will reinforce our market-leading positions. In the UK and Spain, where the majority of sugar demand is from food and drink manufacturers, we have built strong business-to-business offers around security of supply and quality. We have efficient operations, but there remains an opportunity to fully optimise reliability and utilisation to gain valuable additional volumes. In our fields, we are using data to improve yields and profitability for our growers
Primark’s vision is to provide a wide choice of great-quality essential clothing and fashion at prices that are affordable to as many people as possible.
Our strategy is to drive business growth through the development of existing product categories, expansion into new product categories and space expansion in both existing and new markets.
Our customer appeal is supported by our commitment to price leadership, an exciting store environment and our sustainability programme. We are also using our increasingly sophisticated digital and online technologies which are driving marketing and customer engagement.
