Asda’s executive chair Allan Leighton has said that all of the retailer’s best CEOs come from within the business and plans to promote for the role within the senior team he is building.
Leighton stated that after his first successful turnaround of Asda in the 1990s, the leaders that came after him were all from the generation he had brought into the retailer, and that he plans to do the same thing to fill the absent chief executive role this time around.
“If you look at all the CEOs that followed me, they were all from the generation I brought in: [Tony] DeNunzio, Paul Mason, Roger Burnley, Andy Clark, Mike Coupe. They all came from inside Asda,” he said, speaking at LIVE: Retail Week x The Grocer 2026.
“Everybody thinks their business is unique, but Asda is unique. And therefore, I’ve always been of the belief that you should try and promote from within. It’s almost a measure of your success, whether you can promote from within?
“So, for now, that’s the plan. The plan is we’ve hired a group of really talented executives. In my view, there are a number of those that at some stage could move through. For me that would be the most sensible thing to do.”
Leighton also said that he had stopped Asda’s Aldi Price Match because he didn’t want to be advertising to the retailer’s customers about how good the prices were at the discounter.
“Some retailers have expanded into some of our areas, and vice versa. So, the thing for me is not about competing, it’s about standing out. One of the reasons that I stopped the Aldi price comparison stuff everywhere is why would I want to advertise that Aldi have got very good prices in my store? It doesn’t seem to be a very sensible idea to me.
“That’s nothing to do with anybody else, but we only emphasize and talk about ourselves. Seems to me that advertising [competitors] would be stupid.”
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