Tesco has announced that Dave Lewis is stepping down as chief executive officer (CEO) of the company, after five years in the position.
Dave Lewis is resigning from his position at Tesco due to personal reasons and according to chairman John Allan, he regretfully accepted Lewis' resignation as CEO. He will be succeeded by Ken Murphy, who has held senior positions at Walgreens Boots Alliance-owned Boots.
Lewis' departure followed Tesco's report of a 6.7% increase in profits to £494 million in the first half of 2019. Lewis said: "I believe the tenure of a chief executive should be a finite one and that now is the right time to pass the baton. The turnaround is complete, we have delivered all the metrics we set ourselves."
Shore Capital analysts call Lewis the savior of Tesco since he took over the company at a challenging time. Shortly after Lewis was hired, the retailer announced in 2014 that it has been overstating its profits and actually had a loss of £6.4 billion, the biggest-ever loss posted by a UK retailer.
As CEO, Lewis focused on cost reduction, with 4,500 job cuts in 153 Tesco Metro stores announced in August. He also launched Jack's, Tesco's own discount chain, to battle the discounters Aldi and Lidl.
In 2017, he led the company's takeover of Booker, the biggest food wholesaler in the UK, in a deal worth £3.7 billion, creating the "UK's leading food business".
Bernstein analyst Bruno Monteyne pointed out: "We're all trying to grapple exactly about the timing right now," said Mr Monteyne. His departure now was "a total surprise". Not only had it lost the trust of the customers, losing material market to the discounters, it ended up with an accounting fraud... internal morale broken. He really took over a broken company, and from being the most profitable retailer in Europe, suddenly had losses for the first time ever."
Lewis will vacate the position in the summer of 2020.
