Company profile
- Industry
- Grocery and general merchandise retail
- Founded
- 1919
- Headquarters
- Welwyn Garden City, United Kingdom
- Ownership
- Publicly traded
Profiles are auto-generated and infrequently updated.
The analyses
The Market-Entry Gambit · Decision Forks
Tesco Lost Nearly £2bn in America. The Real Damage Was the Books It Cooked at Home.
Tesco's US venture cost nearly £2bn and its books were overstated by £263m. The popular story is greed and a criminal cover-up. The trial record tells a different one: every charged executive walked free.
8 min
The Market-Entry Gambit · Decision Forks
Tesco Promised Break-Even in Two Years; Fresh & Easy Bled for Six
Fresh & Easy is taught as a culture clash. But Tesco promised break-even by year two and never turned a profit in six. The real killer wasn't the ethnography - it was launching a loss-making format into a crash and refusing to stop the bleeding.
8 min
The Turnaround · Decision Forks
Tesco's £6.4bn Loss: The Fraud Was £326m — The Other £6bn Took Years to Build
Tesco's 2015 loss was £6.4bn, one of the largest in British corporate history. The accounting fraud everyone blames it on totalled £326m. The other £6bn was the real story — and it had been building for years before anyone got blamed.
8 min
The Crisis Response · Crisis & Reinvention
Tesco's Auditor Flagged the Exact Risk — the Audit Committee Filed It as Nothing
In 2014 Tesco overstated its profit by hundreds of millions and three executives were charged. The tidy story is fraud by a few bad actors. The truth is worse: the auditor flagged the exact risk, and the audit committee filed it as nothing.
8 min
The Turnaround · Decision Forks
Tesco's Turnaround Was Real. The Justice Was a Myth.
In 2015 Tesco posted a £6.4bn loss and looked finished. Dave Lewis cut £1.5bn of costs and lifted profit eightfold. But the reckoning everyone remembers never happened: all three charged executives were acquitted, and Tesco paid £129m for conduct no court ever pinned on anyone.
8 min
The Flywheel · Business Model
How Buying 53% of Dunnhumby Turned Tesco's Clubcard Into an Unreplicable Data Asset
Everyone copied the card. Nobody could copy what Tesco did next: in 2001 it bought 53% of Dunnhumby for a reported £30m, and turned a discount scheme into a data asset rivals still can't replicate 30 years and 23 million households later.
7 min
The Crisis Response · Crisis & Reinvention
Tesco Survived the Horse in the Burger. It Almost Didn't Survive the Number in the Spreadsheet.
Everyone remembers Tesco's horsemeat scandal. The crisis that nearly broke it came 20 months later: a £263m profit overstatement that drew a £128,992,500 criminal penalty - and then collapsed in court, convicting no one.
8 min