British banking giant Barclays announced on Tuesday that it was planning to significantly slash its dividend by more than 50 percent in 2016 and 2017 in order to boost the company's capital buffer. Apart from this, the financial veteran also announced that it was also planning to let go of its business in Africa.
Investors did not seem to be impressed, with the bank's shares dropping 11 percent during late morning trading on Tuesday.
Barclays has not been having a good year thus far, with the company's stocks taking a massive blow during the initial months of 2016. So far, the company's stocks have tanked about 30 percent since the year started.
The company's declining share prices simply reflect its financial standing, however, as the bank also missed analysts' expectations, posting a net loss of $548 million, a notable increase from its $242 million net loss posted during the previous year.
With the company in relatively dire straits, the bank has initiated a number of restructuring operations in order to salvage and save its profitable businesses. Under the guidance of CEO Jes Staley, Barclays has focused its efforts on a massive restructuring operation, reorganizing the bank along two specific businesses: the company's corporate and investment bank and its retail banking operations. Its operations would also be focused primarily on two areas, the United States and Britain.
Such a restructuring has proven to affect the bank's workforce, as Barclays announced in January that it would be scaling back its businesses in Asia, closing a number of its branches and laying off 1,200 people in its investment bank business.
The latest casualty of the restructuring, of course, is the company's African business, which, under the leadership of the bank's former CEO Antony Jenkins was considered one of Barclays' four pillars.
In its announcement on Tuesday, however, the bank announced that it is planning to sell its 62.3 percent interest in Barclays Africa Group within the next two to three years. Doing so would reduce it to a level that would enable Barclays to remove its African branch from an "accounting and regulatory perspective."
In a news release on Tuesday, Staley asserted the bank's current strategy of focusing its business in the West once more.
"At the heart of Barclays strategy is to build on our strength as a trans-Atlantic consumer, corporate and investment bank anchored in the two financial centers of the world, London and New York," he said.
