The slimmed down Tesco of today looks remarkably different from the Tesco we have all come to know and fall out of love with.

Tesco’s sale this week of its South Korean arm Homeplus has inevitably raised speculation over the future of its other international businesses. After exiting Japan, China, the US and now Korea in recent years, the prospect of it selling its European operations is also being mulled, according to reports.

Whether that comes to fruition or not, the Tesco of today looks remarkably different from the Tesco we have all come to know and fall out of love with.

Gone are the plans for global domination as a tired looking and more humble grocery giant beats a retreat from countries it deems are not worth the trouble when it has bigger problems at home.

And selling Homeplus is part of plans to address those problems. Tesco seems to have got a good price of £4.2bn, more than the £3.9bn that had been mooted. That goes some way to paying down its ballooning debt, which is expected to be in the region of £17.5bn by the year end.

Focus on the UK

Beyond the important financial benefits, the sale also allows for greater focus on the flagging UK arm.

But the sale of an overseas business does not, of course, guarantee success at home. Tesco boss Dave Lewis has handled crisis after crisis adeptly in his first year, but he is yet to truly convince the City that he has regained trading momentum in its British stores. And that, more than anything, is what counts.

It is worth noting that South Korea was actually a decent business for Tesco. It had suffered a challenging couple of years as it was hit by a new policy preventing large companies from trading on Sundays, but overall it was seen as one of Tesco’s better international forays.

It afforded Tesco the useful opportunity to test innovations too, most memorably the shopping wall it piloted in Seoul’s underground stations (pictured). They may not have taken off over here but South Korea, with its tech-savvy consumers, was a useful litmus test for innovation.

But experimentation is no longer top of the agenda for Tesco – and that goes for international expansion as much as it does tech innovations.

As such, it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that in a few years’ time, Tesco’s most far flung stores could be a small hop across the Irish Sea.