Barclays is planning an assault on the United States to capitalise on the vacuum left by damaged American investment banks as it revealed a sub-prime writedown that was smaller than expected yesterday.

Britain’s third-largest bank said that it had a £36 billion exposure to the credit markets, but took a charge of £1.6 billion for 2007, only £300 million higher than an earlier estimate.

Barclays’s results had been keenly awaited as a signal of the impact of the global liquidity crisis on British banks. Alliance & Leicester will report its 2007 figures today and Lloyds TSB on Friday.

Shares in Barclays closed up 3.7 per cent at 477p a share, despite the market getting a scare yesterday morning when Credit Suisse, another bank that had seemed to have escaped the credit crunch relatively unscathed, said that it would take a $1 billion (£510 million) hit in its first-quarter results.

With almost all American banks reporting multibillion-dollar writedowns and working through mass redundancies and new management teams, Bob Diamond, the Barclays president, described America as “the single biggest opportunity in investment banking”. Mr Diamond, who is also chief executive of Barclays Capital, the investment banking business, said: “Look at the players pulling back: what an opportunity for BarCap; what an opportunity for Barclays . . . I don’t want to look back in two or three years and say: ‘We had the opportunity to develop in the US and I flinched.’ And I won’t say that.”

Analysts praised the plan to enter the US in areas of business such as commodities, which BarCap specialised in. “It makes sense - you’re not going to get a chance like that often,” one analyst said.

Barclays reported pretax profits of £7 billion for the 12 months to December 31, down 1 per cent on last year. It raised its dividend by 10 per cent, from 31p to 34p.

BarCap’s writedown would have been higher but was offset by a £658 million fair value increase of the bank’s own credit notes. The bank took a total of £2.7 billion-worth of charges, up 30 per cent on the previous year, including the investment bank’s writedown and impairment charges on loans.

Barclays revealed for the first time a £4.9 billion exposure to Alt-A mortgages - American home loans that are less risky than sub-prime but normally are given to people without credit histories - as well as a £1.3 billion exposure to monoline insurers.

Despite the credit market charge, BarCap reported a 5 per cent increase on 2006’s record profits, with a pretax result of £2.3 billion.

The bank’s international retail and commercial banking business suffered a 23 per cent fall in profits to £935 millions. The division was also hit by a 12 per cent fall in the average value of the South African rand. Absa, the South African bank, is one of Barclay’s largest subsidiaries.

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