Resilient performance in a challenging year

Grosvenor is a long-standing organisation best known for our international property business. Yet, our commercial interests extend across a wide range of activities, including a food and agtech investment portfolio, the management of three UK rural estates, which include one of the UK’s leading milk producers and a timber business producing the highest-quality British-grown timbers, and an insurance broker.

This increasingly diversified portfolio helps to provide financial resilience in the face of challenging economic conditions, whilst also contributing to our common purpose of delivering lasting commercial, social, and environmental benefit, helping to bring solutions to a variety of societal issues.

The economic headwinds associated with high inflation and rising interest rates, alongside continued geopolitical uncertainty, made 2023 challenging from both a market and financial environment perspective. Yet, by adopting a policy of low gearing and holding significant financial capacity, we have been and continue to be well-positioned to see through challenging times and take advantage of potential opportunities by maintaining a long-term view.

Our commercial businesses, while impacted by these adverse conditions, have again delivered resilient performance broadly in line with our expectations, thereby demonstrating the ongoing benefit of our international and sectoral diversification. 

Although our headline results were impacted by modest decreases in asset values and our decision in previous years to slow down development activity, we saw strong underlying profitability, particularly in our UK property business. 

As in previous years, we do not report the collective results of our commercial businesses as the variations in sectors and markets, together with their differences in size, are such that a consolidated set of financial metrics would neither be simple nor particularly meaningful. 

See below (and in our Annual Review) for a summary of the individual performance of our main commercial activities, each of which is committed to working with our customers, communities, and partners to deliver on our purpose, contributing to the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of the communities we are part of. 

Find out more about our Urban Property commercial highlights in our 2023 Financial Statements

* Based on EBITDA as per the most recently approved audited financial statements and excluding administrative charges.