The Bill Comes Due
Asda has finally put a number on what it cost to sever its IT umbilical cord from Walmart: £1.22 billion. That's the cumulative cash outflow through December 31, 2025, for a project called Project Future — the UK's third-largest supermarket chain's multi-year effort to rip out decades of Walmart-era systems and stand on its own two feet.
Four years after Bellis Finco plc bought Asda Group from Walmart in February 2021, the tab is clear. And it's a stinger.
The original estimate was £800 million. By March 2025, The Times was reporting the total would land around £1 billion after a £175 million project increase. By year-end, the figure had crept past £1.2 billion. Budget overruns in enterprise IT are nothing new — ask any CIO who's shepherded an ERP migration. But when the overruns push past 50% of the original estimate and come with a side order of operational chaos, you start wondering whether the problem was the budget or the plan.
Asda's case suggests it was both.
The Deal That Started It All
Here's how we got here. In February 2021, Bellis Finco plc — a consortium backed by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan — completed its acquisition of Asda Group from Walmart. The purchase price was roughly £6.8 billion, but the deal came with strings attached.
Specifically, Walmart wouldn't just walk away. As part of the transaction, Asda signed a Transitional Services Agreement — or TSA — letting Walmart continue running its software and IT infrastructure for an initial three-year period. That included the SAP ERP system that had been managing Asda's back office for years, running from Walmart's servers.
The TSA was supposed to be a bridge. A temporary arrangement while Asda built its own systems and moved off Walmart's platform. Three years, tops. Simple enough on paper.
What happened next is a textbook case of how enterprise transformation projects can spiral when you're racing against a clock you didn't set.
Project Future: 2,500 Systems and a Cloud Dream
Project Future had an ambitious scope. Asda needed to separate more than 2,500 legacy systems from Walmart's estate and migrate every aspect of its operations — stores, distribution centers, head office — onto new IT platforms built from scratch.
The chosen technology stack was SAP S/4HANA, hosted on Microsoft Azure. That's a sensible combination: SAP's latest in-memory ERP platform for the business logic, Azure as the cloud backbone. Both are proven at scale. Both have deep enterprise support ecosystems.
The spending tells the story of a project that kept growing:
- 2021: £24 million — the early planning and design phase
- 2022: £189 million ($244 million) — ramping into implementation
- 2023: £241 million in exceptional costs — full build-out mode
- 2024: £310 million in exceptional costs — the year of the cutover (and the delays)
- 2025: £284 million — finishing touches and stabilization
That final figure is telling. You'd expect spending to taper off as a project nears completion, not stay elevated into the fourth year. But Asda was still wrestling with integration issues well past the point where most people would call it done.
The Cutover That Wouldn't Cut It
January 2024 was supposed to be the big moment. Asda moved off Walmart's SAP ERP system and onto a new instance of S/4HANA hosted in Azure. Theoretically, the hard part was over.
In practice? Not so much.
The Register reported in January 2024 that Asda had already extended its back-office support arrangements with Walmart beyond the initial three-year TSA window. Insiders told media outlets there was "never an expectation" to complete the transition before 2024, and even then, it would be a stretch.
The problems didn't stop there. In December 2024, Asda decided not to go ahead with planned cutover dates for some smaller stores as part of the technical divorce. The following month, in January 2025, it postponed the tech transition of another 55 stores. Walmart continued to support IT at outlets Asda had purchased in the 2021 deal.
Let that sink in. A project billed as a clean break from Walmart's systems ended up requiring Walmart to keep holding the fort — for years past the original deadline.
The human cost of these delays was real, too. In June 2024, about 135 IT staff were transferred to outsourcer TCS. A month later, digital transformation chief Mark Simpson left the business after 28 years of service. Leadership churn like that doesn't help a project that's already behind schedule.
"Totally Self-Inflicted"
August 2025. Asda finally declared Project Future complete — all stores, food depots, and head offices running on new systems. Executive chairman Allan Leighton was candid: "The collective rate of completion did cause some temporary disruption with product availability and in our online experience, which will impact our sales outturn in the current quarter."
CFO Michael Gleeson said the retailer was beginning to benefit from Project Future. Optimism, duly noted.
But by December 2025, the picture had darkened considerably. Leighton told The Times that delays and disruption from the technology separation project had set back Asda's financial turnaround by six months. The tech problems had "materially impacted" its third-quarter trading.
Then came the line that sums up the whole mess: Leighton called the IT issues "totally self-inflicted" and attributed them to "poor integration, insufficient testing, and a lack of capacity planning."
He was blunt about the commercial impact: "The downturn in sales and to a degree the market share issue is totally driven by Future, it's not driven by any competitive activity."
The financial figures from 2025 bear this out. Food, clothing, general merchandise, and food service sales were particularly impacted in the second half of the year — "by disruption following the substantial completion of Project Future affecting on-shelf availability and customer experience online through increased website friction."
Six months of lost sales momentum. A market share slide that Leighton said would continue until Q2 2026. All from a project that was supposed to make the business more agile, not less.
What This Means for Enterprise IT
Asda's Project Future is a cautionary tale that every CIO should read. Not because the technology was wrong — SAP S/4HANA on Azure is a solid stack — but because the execution revealed how easily even well-designed projects can unravel.
The pattern is recognizable: aggressive timelines, underestimation of integration complexity, insufficient testing, and a failure to plan for the messy middle. The TSA was meant to be a safety net — Walmart keeping things running while Asda built its own systems. Instead, it became a crutch that Asda couldn't kick away when it needed to.
The financial math is sobering. £1.22 billion for a project that was supposed to cost £800 million. That's £420 million in unplanned spend — money that could have gone into store upgrades, digital customer experience, or competitive pricing. Instead, it went into untangling a system that should have been straightforward to separate.
The human toll matters too. Losing your digital transformation chief mid-project isn't a badge of honor. Neither is transferring 135 IT staff to an outsourcer while the project is still floundering. These are symptoms of a team that's been pushed past its breaking point.
As for whether Asda will continue spending on Project Future in 2026 — the company hasn't said. Whether it planned to spend £1.22 billion and whether it planned to finish within the original three-year TSA window, the tech team may be forgiven for hoping it's all in the past. ®