Welcome Comments

Jonathan Bloomer:

It's great to be here in Asia. I hope you will all enjoy this week in Asia. It's good to actually switch from the UK where I have been concentrating for the last couple of weeks and switch to this part of the business. I'm going to do a short introduction. This slide you have seen before. I've put it up quite often. It's in part there to show that nothing has changed in the last few weeks. We have businesses in the three areas of the world, all of which were focussing on taking forward with profitable growth, and nothing has changed in any that. They are in very different markets at very different stages. So in the UK it is an area where I focus on profitable growth, has been very narrow, and were are now got to change to view that we can do that on a much broader basis and actually grow profitably on a much broader basis in the UK.

In the US, the US business is doing what we asked it to do a couple of years ago after the turmoil in the US credit markets particularly, which is down-risk some of the business on the investment side, concentrate on generating capital, which they are doing, growing profitably, growing organically, and they'll continue to grow organically, and they are not looking at doing anything of any scale. They will look at, and we have said that over the last 2 or 3 weeks, looking at bold-on acquisitions, the sorts of things they can do within their own capital. But they are generating capital and growing profitably.

And then here in Asia, it becomes a much more complex business and I think one of the things you'll see this week is that significant change in the business, since we were all here in 2000 in terms of the complexity and the scale of the business. It's very difficult to talk about Asia now as a region without boiling it down to individual countries and what's going on in individual countries, and I hope you will see more of that and how well that's going. Just to remind you this is sort of what is lost over the last two or three week, but these are the 3rd quarter sales numbers and with the growth of each of the US is 18%, UK and Europe at 19%, Asia at 12%, with an overall growth rate for the Group of about 16% for the first 3 quarters, which I think shows extremely well the quality of the businesses, how well each of the businesses are now doing, and the way they are driving growth, and profitable growth across each of the regions. But with that, let me hand over to Mark, to take you through the Asia story in more detail.

Close this window