Following the latest announcement regarding Asda’s outsourcing proposal, bosses are understood to have been inundated with questions from worried workers.
Asda’s IT operations have recently been under fire amid a botched systems upgrade that led to thousands of employees being paid incorrectly.
It is understood that Asda is yet to fully resolve its payroll crisis, which first came to light in The Telegraph three months ago.
The Issa brothers, Zuber and Mohsin, bought Asda with TDR for £6.8bn in 2021, relying on huge amounts of debt to finance the deal.
This has since burdened the supermarket’s balance sheet with growing finance costs, which MPs warned last year was hampering the company’s ability to lower prices.
Asda has also been battling to improve its dwindling market share under the Issas and TDR. The supermarket currently accounts for 13.1pc of the grocery market in the UK, compared to 14.4pc three years ago.
Mohsin Issa has been overseeing Asda’s operations since replacing Roger Burnley in 2021, but he is trying to identify a successor.
The Telegraph revealed last week that Asda is prepared to offer up its new chief executive a pay package of up to £10m, which would make them the joint-highest paid supermarket boss in Britain. Currently, the highest-paid chief is Ken Murphy, who is in charge at Tesco.
An Asda spokesman said: “We are building world-class systems in a once-in-a-generation IT transformation – Project Future – to separate Asda from Walmart’s legacy systems.
“Project Future will deliver a step-change in our data capabilities, our customer experience, and competitive edge. Put simply, it is a key building block of our strategy that will set Asda up for long-term success.
“As part of this process, we have taken the difficult decision to propose some changes to our technology function to ensure we have the necessary skills and capabilities in place to support these new systems.
“We have opened a collective consultation with colleagues impacted by this proposed change and will do all we can to support them during this process that they may find unsettling. We are fully on track to complete the three-year Project Future programme by the end of this year.”
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
