Barclays posted a better-than expected first-half profit and announced a cash return of £1.2 billion to its shareholders. Its boss said that the turnaround plan was on track.
The FTSE 100 lender’s pre-tax profit in the six-month period to the end June fell by 8 percent to £4.2 billion, exceeding City analysts’ expectations for a fall of a greater magnitude to £3.8 billion.
The lender has also announced an interim dividend of 2.9% per share, and plans to buy up to £750 million of shares. This brings the total amount returned to investors in the stock market for the first half of the year to £1.2 billion .
Barclays, like other banks, enjoyed a profit boom thanks to higher interest rates last year. However, this tailwind has faded, pushing earnings down. Venkat, Barclays’ chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan is also working to revamp the bank in order to address the concerns of shareholders about the stock market valuation.
He said: “We’re making good progress in our three-year plans, with a Return on Tangible Equity (RoTE), of 11.1% in the first half 2024. This puts us on target for our goal of greater than 10% RoTE in 2020.”
Barclays, one of Britain’s largest lenders, has a large investment banking business and a major cards business in the US. Venkat, the man who was given the charge of the Group in 2021, laid out a plan for reviving the bank in a three-year period. This included a significant increase in the size of Barclays’ business in the UK.
He wants to increase the group’s annual revenues to £30 billion and boost cash returns for investors by returning at least £10billion over a three-year period. Barclays will buy Tesco’s retail bank operations in Britain for approximately £600 million as part of a plan to strengthen its operations in Britain.
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