UK-based retail giant Tesco’s Global Business Services (GBS) unit in India plans to enter the business-to-business (B2B) market by helping retailers across geographies set up capability centres here, said Sumit Mitra, CEO, Tesco Business Solutions.

The company aims to facilitate retailers sized 1-16 billion in Australia, US, MiddleEast and European markets with capabilities to run operations in India. It believes its expertise in the retail market will help enable businesses better and make them a better choice than system integrators.

“Retailers are desperate to reduce costs in the current macro environment and are in a conundrum with the thought building their own captive or capability centres. They face trouble with finding talent and leaders to run operations as India is competitive talent market,” Mitra told businessline.

Tesco’s ambition is to make India a retail hub and create a spine and backbone of retail operations around the world from India, he added. The company said as it is driving 12-15 per cent efficiency at its centre, the workforce can be diverted to work for other retailers.

Mitra said the new foray will be an additional revenue channel for the company and Tesco is in talks with a number of possible clients who are interested to work with the company. It will also be formalising the investments soon.

Tesco entered India in 2004; its centre here started with outsourcing and back-office operations and went on to evolve and become a significant operation driver for the retail giant by running multiple processes.

The company employs approximately 4,500 people in its Bengaluru centre and its employees in India work on all the tech advancements and operations that happen on a global level.

Mitra told that its India team designs all the 4,500 Tesco stores worldwide, does refurbishment and maintenance of the assets in the stores, commercial and contact management lifecycle, manages customer contacts and even does payrolling.

It also has a sourcing team that sources garments and other materials from India and neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Tesco has a retail presence in India through its joint venture with the Tata Group.

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