Tesco has appointed Wendy Becker as a non-executive director, adding the chair of Sony Group Corporation to the board of the largest grocery retailer in the United Kingdom.
The company announced the appointment in a regulatory announcement covering changes to board and committee composition. Becker joins the board with effect from the first of next month and has been appointed to the remuneration committee and to the nominations and governance committee. The chair Gerry Murphy welcomed her to the board in the announcement. GSK, where she is a director, notified her new directorship in a separate announcement on the same day.
Becker is chair of the board and of the nominations committee of Sony Group Corporation, and a non-executive director and chair of the remuneration committee of GSK. She was chief executive of the clothing retailer Jack Wills, and held senior roles at McKinsey and Company, TalkTalk and Vodafone. She was previously chair of Logitech International.
The committee assignments are the substance of the appointment. Putting a sitting remuneration committee chair from another large listed company straight onto the Tesco remuneration committee is a deliberate choice at a moment when executive pay in British retail is politically exposed. Grocery is among the most visible employers of low paid workers in the country, and pay votes at the largest retailers have drawn unusually close attention from both institutional investors and the press.
The second committee matters for a different reason. The nominations and governance committee controls board succession, and Tesco's board has been through steady renewal over recent years. A director who chairs the board of a very large and complex international group brings direct experience of running that process from the other side.
Her operating background also fits the strategic question the company faces. Tesco's growth increasingly depends on things that are not grocery retailing in the traditional sense: its loyalty data business, its retail media proposition and its digital subscription offering. Those are consumer technology and telecommunications problems in a supermarket's clothing, and Becker has spent most of her executive career in exactly those industries rather than in food retail.
The appointment also arrives as the composition of British retail boards comes under scrutiny for a shortage of genuinely international experience at a time when supply chains, sourcing and technology partnerships are all decided across borders. A director who chairs a Japanese group and sits on the board of a global pharmaceutical company brings a perspective that is rare on a domestic grocery board.
The appointment takes effect at the start of next month.
