Britain's biggest retailer, supermarket group Tesco, said Monday that it planned to axe up to 9,000 jobs under the next stage of a vast restructuring programme, as it continues to come up against increasing competition from German discount retailers Aldi and Lidl. Tesco, which employs about 300,000 staff in the UK out of a total global workforce of 440,000, added that it would try to find new roles for up to 50 percent of those affected. "Overall, we estimate that up to 9,000 Tesco colleague roles could be impacted, however, our expectation is that up to half of these colleagues could be redeployed to other customer-facing roles," the supermarket said in a statement.

"In our four years of turnaround we've made good progress, but the market is challenging and we need to continually adapt to remain competitive," said Britainn and Ireland CEO Jason Tarry Tesco said jobs would go as it planned to shut counters at some stores serving items such as fresh fish, meat and cheeses.

It intends also to simplify the way it controls stocks of goods, as well as reducing head office numbers and shutting staff canteens in favour of self-service kitchen facilities. "We expect that around 90 stores will close their counters, with the remaining 700 trading with either a full or flexible counter offer for our customers," Tesco said in the statement. Tarry added: "We're making changes to our UK stores and head office to simplify what we do and how we do it, so we're better able to meet the needs of our customers."

Tesco's share price closed down 1.7 percent at 221 pence on London's FTSE 100 index, which lost 0.9 percent overall. "The group is engaging in a strict cost cutting scheme as a way of coping with the rise of Lidl and Aldi," noted David Madden, market analyst at CMC Markets UK. "The stock has pushing higher since late December, and if the move continues it might target the 245 pence region."

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019