Our financial architecture is designed to support the delivery and execution of the Group’s strategy, and drive sustainable growth in core earnings per share and free cash flow in order to maximise total returns to shareholders.

The architecture has established four key financial priorities for GSK in delivering sustainable sales growth, improving our operating leverage, improving our financial efficiency and converting more of our earnings into cash.

By applying this framework we can drive better and more consistent decision making across the company and improve delivery of our key financial objectives of earnings per share growth and free cash flow generation. This can then be returned to shareholders or reinvested in bolt-on acquisitions, wherever the most attractive returns are available. Our decisions are rigorously benchmarked using a cash flow return on investment (CFROI) returns based framework.

Financial reporting

We have also improved our financial reporting to align it more closely with our architecture. We are providing more data and insights into the progress we are making in each of our businesses and regions and on our progress against the key drivers of operational and financial efficiency.

In 2012 we transitioned our reporting to a core basis, enabling greater visibility of the underlying performance of the business.