Online food and internet retailing director Tesco (2011 rank: 5)
Ken Towle is fast becoming one of the key figures in online UK retail, heading a division of the UK’s largest retailer that generates an estimated £2.7bn of sales a year.
Tesco veteran Towle, a likeable and softly-spoken character in what is doubtless one of retail’s toughest boardrooms, is tasked with leading Tesco’s online business development as well as leading its multichannel strategy.
Having been with the retailer since 1985, Towle has largely worked in UK operations.
He was parachuted in to take control of Tesco’s online business in March 2011 and has approached the job with his sleeves rolled up.
The 47-year-old former president and chief executive of Tesco China relaunched Tesco’s non-food website earlier this year and has led the expansion of a network of ‘dark stores’, which includes the four existing and two planned around London, and is in the process of finding further locations in big cities including Birmingham and Manchester.
Towle is a self-confessed workaholic who claims he would have been an entrepreneur, manufacturer, teacher or writer if he hadn’t gone into retail. He will have to draw on his breadth of skills to achieve Tesco’s aims in the coming months.
The grocer is poised to merge all of its apps into one and Towle is also charged with rolling out click-and- collect services for both non-food and grocery as Tesco aims to take the lead among the grocers in terms of technological development.
He has set an ambitious target of doubling the grocer’s online food revenue to £5.5bn in the next five years, as the popularity of internet food shopping grows. Tesco already holds about a 50% market share in food online.
Towle faces a challenging year, with Morrisons’ fledgling online offer and Sainsbury’s and Asda’s growing multichannel businesses competing in the sector – not that it will phase Towle.
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