Company Background

Introduction of Organisation

The selected company in this research is Tesco (Woolwich and Welling Branches) where there are a range of people from different cultural backgrounds. Tesco is one of the UK based retail supermarket chain. As it is an international company, there are many people from different countries of the world with their own distinct culture, religion, sexual orientation, language, etc. The research on how Tesco has been handling the diversity of people is helpful to promote their aim and objectives among diverse workforce.

Tesco is the fastest and largest growing retail chain in UK as well as international arena. There are many grocery supermarket retailers in the world. Tesco has its own distinct identity as one of the world's largest retailers among them. It is a grocery supermarket retailer that has a global chain business. It is the fourth largest supermarket in the world after Wal-Mart (USA), Carrefour (France) & Home depot (USA) and the largest in the UK. It has got many branches in several countries viz. Japan, Czech Republic, Thailand, Hungary, Taiwan, Poland, South Korea, Ireland, Malaysia, Slovakia, Turkey and China.

The glorious history of Tesco goes back to 1919. A single man called Jack Cohen started as a single person business in the east of London. The name, Tesco as a brand name came into existence in 1924. Jack Cohen, a small business man T. E. Stockwell in a large amount through shipment. He coined the acronym TESCO by taking the first three alphabets from T. E. Stockwell (TES) and two alphabets from his surname Cohen (CO) deriving the acronym TESCO. It has its own visionary strategy to grow and expand in the world. These strategies are mainly categorized in four parts. The first one is to grow as a core business in the UK. The second one is to grow in the world. Similarly, the next one is to be equally stronger in non-food items like in food items and the last one is to go along with the customers in new retail business.

Tesco is an internationally expanding retailer which is based in the UK. Being the largest British grocery retailer, Tesco is able to occupy 30.4% (4-traders, 2013) of grocery retail market share where as Asda and Sainsbury which are its competitors have approximately equal share if added together in the market of the UK. Other than the specialization in food items, it has expanded its range of productions in clothing, DVDs, CDs, electronic items, finance, internet service, music, software of budget, etc.

4.2 Tesco in the Beginning of New Millennium

Heralding a new fortune, Sir Terry Lehy came on the front of Tesco as the chief executive officer in 1997 at the verge of new millennium by developing four-fold growth strategies which are already mentioned above. Before Lehy, Tesco was undertaking only with food items. He executed a plan to start the business on non-food items. It was a notorious challenge to make the non-food business as good as food business. Tesco started a tesco.com business in 2000 AD. It enormously boosted Tesco to emerge as the world's largest grocery service. It started producing and serving electronic stuffs, toys, kitchenware, sports, etc. Later in2002, it started serving clothes at discounted price. It became very much popular. Lehy remarkably extended its market internationally between1998 to 2004. Under the guidance of the giant figure Lehy, Tesco, increased its market shares from 15.4 per cent to 28 per cent between the years 1998 to 2004. The year 2005 became a boon for it. It gained $10.2 million of net income in the year. As time passed by, Tesco grew bigger and bigger. Tesco acquired 80 per cent stake of casino's leader price in Poland in 2006. The year 2007 was a bit bitter for Tesco as the stores in the UK were closed for a short period suspecting bomb in its stores. An investigation was done and found a device that was doubtful. So, the store and the area nearby were closed by the bomb disposal team of army and the suspected device was disposed safely. Lately in 2009, Tesco launched a super tomato that does not leak. Mainly, it was meant for sandwiches. Recently, Tesco got the deal to be an official sponsor of the World Cup Football-2010.

There are more than 300,000 employees and over 3,000 stores of Tesco in the UK. As it is mainly based on the UK, more than 60% of its sale and profit come only from the UK business. Tesco announced a £1billion commitment for the year 2012/2013 in April, 2012 to make the shopping of the customers memorable. It has mainly focused on the six key components in its UK plan (tescoplc, 2013) namely service and staff, stores and format, price and value, range and quality, and clicks and bricks.

4.3 Strategy of Tesco

Tesco, in its preliminary report (2004), said that it continued to make strong progress with its all four parts of strategies. The strategies were a strong UK core business, non-food business, retailing business and international business. They made some schemes to achieve those strategies by focusing on excellent customer service. They concentrated on making the shopping of the customers memorable. Secondly, they thought of reducing the price to save the expenses. In the same way, they would offer the convenience stores at an easily accessible place so that the customers did not have to travel long. Finally, they would bring changes in the system so that it would add simplicity and value in the market full of twists and turns (files.investis, 2013).

Similarly, there are many services provided by Tesco. Some of them are groceries, petrol station called Tesco express where the prices are taken at a competitive basis. Such extension of Tesco put challenges