(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the five years since Tesco Plc was plunged into the biggest crisis in its history, Dave Lewis, its chief executive officer, has executed an (almost) textbook turnaround of Britain’s biggest retailer.
He’s now decided that his job is done and he will hand over the reins next year to Ken Murphy of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.
“Drastic Dave” — a moniker Lewis picked up because of his cost-cutting zeal in a former job at Unilever Plc — took Tesco out of intensive care. He revived sales growth, restored profit, cut debt and reinstated the dividend. The shares are 18% higher than they were back in 2014, when Tesco announced a bombshell 250 million-pound ($307 million) profit black hole. That stock price increase is twice that of the FTSE 100 index.
There’s still a vague sense of disappointment, though. One might have expected some Lewis initiatives, such as taking prices closer to those of the German-owned discount grocers Aldi and Lidl, to bear more fruit. While Tesco is managing to grind out incremental growth in an ever-more-competitive market, it’s hard to get too excited by that.
Lewis did deliver on his key turnaround target: lifting the company’s operating margin to between 3.5% and 4% six months earlier than expected. So he’s making the wise move for a CEO of going out on a high note.
But it’s curious that he didn’t appear to be in the running for two other high-profile CEO posts that have been filled recently, at the consumer goods giants Unilever Plc and Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc. Lewis doesn’t have another job to go to and plans to take some time off before thinking about his next move.
The choice of replacement is certainly a surprise. Lewis’s natural successor was Charles Wilson, the popular ex-boss of Booker, which Tesco bought in 2018. However, he stepped back from running Tesco’s British arm last year due to illness. Murphy was joint chief operating officer at Walgreens’ British pharmacy chain Boots before being promoted at the American parent. So he does have experience in the fiercely competitive U.K. retail market.
Still, he has no direct experience of the cutthroat grocery sector, which has been transformed by the price-slashing antics of Aldi and Lidl. This is Tesco’s greatest challenge. At least Murphy will benefit from the advice of Wilson, who still has a senior role at Tesco.
While the supermarket giant has prospered from the weakness of its great rival J Sainsbury Plc, the latter appears to have gotten its act together lately. And while the British shopper has remained pretty immune to Brexit so far, a no-deal departure from the European Union might change that.
It won’t be easy to balance these challenges against an investor base that’s expecting a special dividend or buybacks from next year. Already Tesco’s U.K. sales growth has slowed. That may reflect a broader deceleration across the grocery market, after a strong 2018, but a slowdown is a slowdown. Shareholders are naturally cautious about the management change, although the stock did rise 2% in a falling London market on Wednesday.
At least Lewis didn’t hang around beyond his sell-by date, unlike so many other CEOs.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net
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Andrea Felsted is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the consumer and retail industries. She previously worked at the Financial Times.
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