The Wedgwood company is led by the prime Wedgwood brand for tableware, gift collections, jewellery and recently introduced personal accessories and is complemented by the quality brands Johnson Brothers, Coalport and Mason's Ironstone to ensure that style, type and price range enable Wedgwood to provide the best products to appeal to the broadest section of the world public.

As we move towards the millennium, Wedgwood aims to double the size of its business and treble profits by becoming one of the world's leading luxury gift companies. Achieving this means expanding into new business categories and developing new distribution channels. Already in Japan, where the Wedgwood brand enjoys superstar status, the core business has been expanded significantly by targeting specially tailored new Wedgwood products and high quality brand extensions.

Wedgwood brand tea and coffee has been joined by table linens, silks and handkerchiefs featuring Wedgwood patterns, personal accessories and leather goods and even food with the launch of Wedgwood brand preserves and cookies.

The acceptability of Wedgwood as a gift in Japan powerfully symbolises the global potential for growth in this area and serves as a solid foundation to grow this brand status in other markets around the world.

New stores have been opened recently in Shanghai and Beijing in China and new distributors and agents in India and Pakistan have been engaged to help embrace these important, emerging market places of the future.

With company headquarters based in the heart of the Staffordshire countryside at Barlaston, seven other manufacturing units in Stoke-on-Trent, Wedgwood subsidiaries located in France, Holland, Canada, Australia, the USA, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore; and independent distributors operating in Belgium, Italy, France, Spain and the Scandinavian countries, Wedgwood activity is well and truly on a global scale. A regional export director also travels the rest of the world including South America, Africa, the Middle East and the former Eastern Bloc.

Nearer to home, Wedgwood is aiming to be first class in another field as one  of the leading industrial tourism venues in Europe. Plans are underway to bring the award-winning visitor centre and museum into the next millennium with a new Visitor Experience. Incorporating the traditional handcraft demonstrations, a factory tour, the museum, art gallery, a video theatre and exhibition area, the new centre will also run up to the minute visual displays and computer-aided visitor interaction stations.

In establishing itself as one of the world's leading luxury gift companies, Wedgwood is committed to a development challenge that really will secure the greatest future growth."