Barclays





In Section 1:


Introduction Chairman's Statement Group Chief Executive's Statement Financial Performance Group Finance Director The Leadership Team
	Looking now at our other global businesses, Barclays Capital and Barclays Global Investors. In an extremely difficult environment for investment banks around the world, Barclays Capital delivered one of its best ever performances in 2002, making a return on economic capital of 19%. Our performance in a key league table (the Euromoney Global All Debt Table – which aggregates the volume of bonds, medium term notes and loans) shows that we have been taking market share, rising to 5th position in the world (2001: 8th position). Barclays Capital was the only top ten investment bank to increase debt issuance volumes in 2002, a year when overall volumes in the market were down sharply. This strong overall performance reflected our concentrated approach to the recruitment of business originators, our energetic risk management and our ability to flex our costs to accommodate the tougher income generating environment. Barclays Capital is a business strongly positioned for sustained growth. I will also say a few words about Barclays Global Investors. I like this business, especially from the point of view of portfolio diversity. Its performance is dominated by fees and commissions, it has its main business in the United States and it is a low utiliser of regulatory capital. It leads the world in index replication and in exchange traded funds and has a growing franchise in active fund management. Notwithstanding the impact on assets under management of collapsing stock market indices, Barclays Global Investors still manages funds of more than Ł460 billion. Operating profits grew 41%1 during the year. The development of our wealth management business is one of our strategic priorities. Barclays Private Clients serves around one million clients and we manage some Ł85 billion of assets on their behalf. 2002 was a particularly difficult year for the wealth management industry as a whole. Markets, of course, were terrible. The FTSE 100 index fell 24%. Several major competitors have either withdrawn or stood back. What distinguishes the successful from the unsuccessful in this sector is the breadth of distribution base, the cost to recruit new customers and access to world-class products. Barclays is advantaged in these dimensions, and our development path this year has been characterised by further consolidation of the originating businesses of Barclays Private Clients, the integration of our banking and investment management customer offerings and the steady development of our strategic partnership with Legal & General. We acquired Charles Schwab Europe on 31st January 2003, an execution-only retail stockbroker to strengthen further our stockbroking business. In 2002, we continued to build our European retail and commercial banking businesses through organic development. By way of example we made good strides in growing our Spanish business, enhancing the value of this business through capturing profitable market share. The launch of Openplan in Spain is an example of our ability to develop successful products and transport them cross-border. Our market share of net new business in mortgages in Spain increased from 0.5% in 2001 to 5% in 2002, consequent on the introduction of Openplan. 1Operating profit excludes the impact of the restructuring charge relating to staff displacement and related costs, costs directly associated with the integration of Woolwich plc, Woolwich fair value adjustments and goodwill amortisation.	Click to go to each page