Our business
Market overview and trends
Overview
Contract foodservice and support services offer significant growth opportunities.
The global contract foodservice market has an approximate value of £150 billion with around 50% outsourced to contractors like Compass and our market grows at around 5% a year.
The support services market (including catering, soft services such as cleaning and hard services such as building maintenance) has an approximate value of £700 billion. Circa 35% of this is outsourced to contractors with the outsourcing market projected to grow at around 10% a year.
Trends
Both the markets in which we operate have significant growth potential. The trend by organisations over the last decade to reduce subsidies and to outsource their foodservice requirements is continuing. Clients are moving away from management fee contracts to arrangements where the contractor bears the risk. Approximately 70% of our contracts are now fixed price or profit & loss. This means that we have to adopt different operating disciplines that are more retail orientated in order to grow profitability and returns for shareholders.
We are also seeing organisations accelerate the consolidation of a range of support services such as cleaning and reception as well as catering under one outsourced contract. We are ideally placed to offer an integrated solution to clients. Our challenge is to leverage these growth opportunities profitably and sustainably in order to create value for shareholders.
The Annual Review 2006 does not contain sufficient information to allow a full understanding of the results of the Group. The separate Annual Report 2006 constitutes the full Annual Financial Statements and can be downloaded in PDF format (3.2Mb) from this site.