Tesco plc, the world’s third-largest retailer, plans to accelerate the rollout of its online service to nearly every market it operates in this year as it seeks Internet growth to compensate for a declining domestic market.
"We’re aspiring to get online in every country," Ken Towle, the UK grocer’s director of Internet retailing, said in an interview. The service has started in the Czech Republic and Poland, and "we’re going to Slovakia next," he said. "We plan to get to nearly all of them this year."
Tesco’s plan represents a quickening from an initial strategy to start online grocery shopping in at least one major city in each market in the next few years. It has a developed Internet business in South Korea as well as in the UK, where online sales are "approaching high single digits" in percentage terms. That compares to a market average for online grocery shopping of 3% to 4%, Towle said.
