The company has expanded recently into areas related in some way to its core activity in home shopping, and one of these areas is a business called Zendor. Financial services is another area of opportunity for us. Currently it only accounts for some GBP1.5 million of the Group s annual GBP50 million profits, but we see it as an area of strong growth. This includes unsecured loans, insurance and other financial products which are sold to customers on our database. At the moment, we are an intermediary, but we are prepared to move progressively and act as a principal according to the level of risk.
Information is a key part of our business.
We have something like three terabytes of data going back over the last six years of transaction information on the two million customers who buy from us regularly. This is an area of our core competency, but it is also where some additional growth can take place. We believe this is down to the positioning of our catalogues, the strength of our offer, and also the frequency of contact that we make to our customers. Clothing is a difficult area at the moment. So, it is possible to develop these new ranges reasonably quickly to build on the confidence the customer has in the main offer, which is clothing.