Virgin is a leading international investment group and one of the world's most recognised and respected brands. Conceived in 1970 by Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin Group has gone on to grow successful businesses in sectors ranging from mobile telephony, travel, financial services, leisure, music, holidays and health & wellness. Across its companies, Virgin employs approximately 50,000 people, in 34 countries and global branded revenues in 2011 were around £13bn ($21bn).
Virgin believes in making a difference. We stand for value for money, quality, innovation, fun and a sense of competitive challenge. We strive to achieve this by empowering our employees to continually deliver an unbeatable customer experience.
Virgin frequently creates partnerships with others and excels in combining skills, knowledge, and operational expertise from a range of industries to build exciting and successful companies.
Once a Virgin company is up and running, several factors help to ensure its on-going success. The global power of the Virgin brand; Richard Branson’s personal reputation; our unrivalled network of friends, contacts and partners; the Virgin management style; the empowerment of staff; and of course a large helping of Virgin flair all contribute to the success of our ventures.
Virgin Group companies are part of one big family rather than a hierarchy. They are empowered to run their own affairs, yet the companies actively help one another, and solutions to problems are often sourced from within the Group. In a sense they form a commonwealth, with shared ideas, values, interest and goals.
At our core we believe business must be a force for good and use its influence and resources to help find solutions to some of the world's major issues.
We founded Virgin Unite, our non-profit foundation, to drive this change and it partners with our companies to implement programmes and campaigns around issues such as health, economic empowerment, conservation and climate change.
If you’d like to know more about the Virgin Group you should check out our History section for the official account of our rise from a small mail order record company to the global brand we are today.
