Tesco stepped up its drive to rival Wal-Mart on the international stage yesterday by announcing a £958 million acquisition that transforms its prospects in South Korea.

Britain's biggest supermarket is buying 39 hypermarkets in the country in a move that almost triples its presence in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

It is the largest acquisition in Tesco's history and comes only weeks after the Competition Commission called for tougher planning rules that analysts believe will curb the supermarket's growth in Britain.

Philip Clarke, Tesco's international director, told The Times: “This is absolutely bang on strategy. Korea is our most important market outside the UK. It's wonderful business, with high sales, good returns.

“We are second in the market. This promotes us very close to the market leader E-Mart and gives us a number of hypermarkets in Seoul, where we haven't had much of a presence before.”

Mr Clarke indicated that the deal put into context the widespread questioning of Tesco's success in the United States, where it launched the Fresh & Easy convenience chain seven months ago. “While I understand the coverage, it has been ridiculous,” he said. “We have big ambitious plans for Fresh & Easy but we are very quietly getting on doing what we do in the rest of the world.”

Tesco is buying the stores - which average 80,000 sq ft - from E-Land, a South Korean company that in turn bought them from Carrefour, the French supermarket giant, for £1 billion two years ago.

Mr Clarke said that Tesco had considered making a move two years ago, but at the time it thought that the asking price was too high.

Tesco is already one of the world's biggest retailers behind Wal-Mart and Carrefour, but Sir Terry Leahy, its chief executive, wants to generate more than half the group's total sales from international markets.

Roughly a quarter of Tesco's £47 billion revenue came from overseas in 2007-08, with £5.5 billion coming from Asia. The group operates in 12 countries outside Britain, including China, the US and Thailand.

The group was the first foreign retailer to enter South Korea when it signed a deal with Samsung to open supermarkets in the country in 1999. At present it operates 52 hypermarkets in the country under the Home-plus brand and 39 convenience stores, but runs only a dozen in Seoul, where 15 million people, a quarter of the population, live. About 20 of the E-Land hypermarkets being acquired by Tesco, which operate under the Homeover brand, are based in Seoul.

The South Korean economy is the thirteenth-biggest in the world and is growing at around 5 per cent per annum.

Mr Clarke said: “In the 1960s the country was poorer than Africa. Look at it today - it's transformed.”

Tesco's shares fell 6p to 430p. Philip Dorgan, a Panmure Gordon analyst, said that the acquisition was a “good strategic deal ... The cost per store looks fairly high, but this reflects that most of the stores are in Seoul. The stores are underperforming in terms of sales, and this is where the opportunity lies.”

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