Where we are now with Walmart is at a critical juncture in retail. Amazon and e-commerce has continued to dominate the retail space once led by brick-and-mortars. Walmart has had to shift its focus from being a primarily brick-and-mortar store chain to having an online presence as well in order to fight for market share. We are in the retail market: we sell virtually every type of retail item and offer several services, such as gas fill-up, oil change, car repair, etc. Our company began as a discount outlet, but with most retailers now acting as discount outlets, we try to stay competitive with prices.

Our customers and markets are all over the world. We have nearly 12,000 stores in over 25 different countries and serve over 200 million customers every day (Karbastera, 2016; Jurevicius, 2018). We have attempted to expand into some countries and found little success, but in many cases our retail outlets have been embraced by a range of customers in different parts of the planet (Rao, 2014).

Our competitors consist of other retailer chains like Target in North America, Costco, Dollar General, IKEA around the world, and Amazon and Alibaba online (Pearson, 2015; Jurevicius, 2018).

Our financial strengths include an increasing year-over-year revenue of 485.873 billion USD in 2017, nearly a 1% increase from 2016. However, our weakness is evident in declining net profits: 13.643 billion USD in 2017 versus 14.694 billion USD in 2016—a fall of more than 7% (Jurevicius, 2018).

2

Walmart started out in the 1970s by providing customers a discount outlet option through which our company beat the prices of competitors in the market. We acquired several companies along the way and expanded rapidly over the years so that we quickly climbed to the top of the retail industry and became a top-tier Fortune 500 company. Strategic acquisitions have helped the company to secure its foothold. The company is currently looking to penetrate emerging markets, having reached a saturation point in most developed markets by now. India remains closed off, but the option to purchase Massmart in South Africa attracted our interest in 2010.

The critical steps that we took in the beginning were to keep focused on our business’s core concepts: 1) offering a great product at discount prices for consumers while still guaranteeing a profit for the company, 2) developing and maintaining...

By controlling the supply chain effectively, we have been able to minimize costs. However, as more and more discounters—especially online retailers—enter into the market, margins have been squeezed so that there is little room to go any lower given the restrictions of our supply chain.
Over the years, we have made some mistakes. For example, when we attempted to expand into South Korea and Germany, we failed to adapt to the local cultures and for that reason, we were ultimately rejected by consumers in these countries. What we learned was that our style of retail is not suited for every consumer and in cases where consumers are used to a different type of shopping experience, we must either adapt to the consumer’s wishes or not attempt to penetrate that market.

What has changed since we began this business has been the nature of the business itself. Online shopping is gathering steam by leaps and bounds and numerous brick and mortar retailers have been forced out of the business because of their inability to stay competitive (CBS News, 2017). Unless something happens in the future to make e-commerce no longer viable—such as massive destabilization of the Internet or online security failure—e-commerce will have to be more and more the focus of the industry and of our company going forward.

3

Creating our perfect future will depend on several action steps that allow us to increase our online presence and become a go-to source for Internet consumers while also finding the right appeal for our brick and mortar stores in emerging markets. We want to be a dominant player in e-commerce as well as in brick and mortar retail both in developed markets and in emerging markets.

In one year from now, we want to advance our exposure online so as to chip away at Amazon’s and Alibaba’s market share of e-commerce. This will require increased advertising in order to get consumers to come to our website first before going to competitors’. In two years, we want to be able to establish our brick and mortar presence in new emerging markets in Africa, such as in South…