Tesco to be 770-strong in India by Dec '05

BANGALORE: UK's largest retailer and the world's third largest retailer, Tesco is planning to be 770 strong in India by December 2005. The workforce is being built to offer IT application development, second and third tier support and BPO services for its own global operations. The company is hiring quite aggressively and has employed about 100 people so far, out of which 45 personnel are for IT and the rest for the support services.

The $55 billion company, had earlier this year announced to move about 430 IT jobs from its UK headquarters to India, in order to be centrally located and save costs. Although it continues to outsource IT work to Indian services companies such as Infosys and Xansa, Tesco has decided to go ahead and build it own IT capabilities to services its operations worldwide. However, it confirms that outsourcing of IT work would continue to these services companies.

It has embarked on a global IT project in consolidating its operations to be run on a popular retail application called Retek, a business application from a US company. "Presently each of our subsidiaries in different countries run in different applications. To make it uniform across the world, we have embarked on this project. Apart from Retek, we would be using Oracle for financials, Peoplesoft for HR and other applications for various components of our businesses. It would take about three to four years for the implementation of the project to be completed. We foresee India to be contributing to Tesco's business application and support needs in co-ordination with the UK headquarters," said Philip Greenwood, Head of IT and Support, Tesco HSC.

The company has 1200 people in IT alone in the UK, out of which 430 IT job roles are being moved to Bangalore. Started in April 2004, the shared service center of Tesco is planning to move into its own campus in Whitefield by November 2004, which would be able to accommodate 1000 seats.

The Tesco Group has turnover of £33,557 million with profits of £1,708m. They have 2,318 stores and employ 326,000 people in the 12 countries in which they operate. In Europe, outside the UK, they operate in Ireland, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Turkey where they have 261 stores and 55,000 employees. In Asia they have 179 stores and 34,000 employees spread across Thailand, S. Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Japan.