Walmart Globalization Case Study

Wal-Mart is an American multinational retail corporation and one of the leading discount department retail stores (Wikipedia). It is the highest- grossing company in the United States (Fortune 2008a), and is by far one of the most successful companies worldwide. Wal-Mart offers a place to buy the majority of our goods under one roof like electronics, furniture, clothing, pharmacy, sports, food, books etc. Wal-Mart sells good at lower price than the others and this is even shown by its slogan “save money, live better”.  It drives out smaller and sometimes even the expensive stores out of business due to its lower prices. Wal-Mart provides jobs for thousands of

The location of the first Wal-Mart in the Fortune Global 500 for the year of 2001 to 2002 turnover of 219.81 billion dollars. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the retail in the world. The company was much larger than its competitors in the United States - Sears Roebuck, Kmart, JC Penney and Nordstrom combined. In 2002, Wal-Mart operates more than 3,500 discount stores, Supercenters and Sam's Clubs in United States and over 1,170 stores in major countries around the world. The company also sells products online via the website, www.walmart.com. Wal-Mart is one of the largest private employers in the world, with the use of force about 1.28 million. The

As the world’s largest retail store in the world, Walmart wants to be in every market that they can be prosperous in. They know they rule the United States market, so why not try to expand overseas and dominate those markets as well. Now that they have reached limits on expansion here in the U.S., the next step was to test the water in other nations. As they began to go international, there were many critics saying they will never make it because their business practices and culture wouldn’t work in other countries. Yet the company’s globalization efforts progressed at a rapid pace. Its more than 4,263 international retail units employ more than 660,000

When I searched for the definition of the culture, I found many definitions, some of them:

Wal-Mart is defined as the giant of retail and it is one of the largest companies in the world. It has grown to not only be a staple in America but internationally as well, touching base in countries such as Japan and China. It is a popular supercenter that is located worldwide. Wal-Mart is the largest retailer and the largest company in the history of the world due to globalization and this due to the way they conduct business operations. Wal-Mart management has implement ways to overcome the challenges that are presented the ethical and social

Culture, is comprised of the beliefs, customs, arts, and the way of life of a particular society, group, place, or time of a particular society or group of people. (Incorporated. (n.d.).

         Unraveling the concept of Wal-Mart exposes a simple idea of providing basic necessities at an affordable rate. A superb way of viewing a business is to look objectively at its’ operations. This begins by looking at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats or to conduct a SWOT analysis of Wal-Mart.

The definition of culture states that it means a way of life of a group of people, the behaviors the beliefs values and symbols that they accept. Generally without thinking about them, and they are passed along by communication and imitation by one generation to the next.

Walmart Stores Incorporated is a retail giant that went from a small town business which was started in 1962 by Sam Walton, to a Global phenomenon. Walmart is ranked as one of the largest retail stores globally. It has over 2 million employees and revenues of over $480 billion in sales as of January 2016. (Chain store age, 2016). It is an icon in the cultural fabric of America and has also firmly established itself as a competitor in the global market with the store 's expansion globally. Walmart is unique in maintaining low prices and quality products in a market that seek high profit margins to sustain visibility and customers. While Walmart has maintained its impact on the global retail market and in business, it has not done so without facing many challenges and obstacles. Walmart has managed to draw criticism from its stakeholders for which it has had to defend its marketing strategies and how it affects them as stakeholders. One of the major criticism that Walmart has had to face by its competitor stakeholders, is its effect on smaller retail businesses once it moves into a community. Once Walmart opens a superstore in a community, many local stores go out of business. This is as a result of Walmart pricing and low cost products which makes it hard for competing stakeholders to stay in the market. These stakeholders have accused Walmart of driving down prices, whereby they were forced to go out of business. Walmart, however, has often defended its pricing as

Over the past decades, Wal-Mart has grown to become one of the largest retail stores in the world. They operate internationally and keep growing each passing year. They have developed some unique strategies that they have used allowing the company to grow into a multinational company. Various case studies and researches have sought to explain the success of this company over the years. Ken Mark from The University of Western Ontario conducted a case study on Wal-Mart and came up with some sound conclusions.

Since Walmart has been able to dominate the market for affordable and convenient retailing throughout the world, we know by hand that Walmart has all the components that a company needs to be successful in today’s market. Walmart’s has been able to live up to its slogan “Save Money, Live Better!!!” by providing all its customers with the best prices and values, but by also providing great service, convenient locations etc. Walmart “has grown substantially over recent years, and has experienced global expansion, which only helps its prosperity. This is one of Walmart’s greatest strengths – they are recognized on the global scale and have high brand equity. Walmart is the largest employer in the United States and a retail giant that has the clout to make or break suppliers. This is a strength because they have most of the power in their targeted market. Walmart is the largest grocery retailer in the United States, with an estimated 20% of the retail grocery and consumables business, as well as the largest toy seller in the U.S (Jan).” Walmart strengths include:

Walmart is one of the most significant company’s in the world. Its presence is felt all over the place as it has managed to appear of headlines as one of the best in its time. In the year 2011 alone, the company was reported to have been the largest in the world with a net worth of 420$ billion. It had employed 2.2 million people all over the world. The United States were the beneficiaries however because they contributed an employment percentage of 62% with an approximate 1.4 million workers. Their services have still extended to other parts of the world like Africa, Korea, Germany and India.

Wal-Mart is an organization that has been extremely successful in achieving its goals of becoming top retail store in the world. Managers for this organization must plan, organize, lead, and control each component of this organization in order to secure its success. There are factors, internal and external, that can impact these four functions within an organization. Management 's responsibility is to take these factors into consideration to ensure that business will be successful. These factors are its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT). (Bateman-Snell, 2009)

Throughout the years, Walmart’s strategy is being a great formula of success in the United States and they kept growing in a way that there was nothing else to go because the market was so saturated in America that if they wanted to grow and produce more profits, they would have to do something else. Along with the saturation of the market, Walmart realized that the American population was only 4% of the global population and there was 96% of the population out from America that could be explored, and there were developing countries that had a great potential to make profits to Walmart. Due to the saturation of the American market, opportunity in developing countries to grow and most of the population of America, the most natural way to keep growing and creating opportunities to grow in fact was going to do business with international markets.

Wal-Mart is a company which operates in the service sector, more specifically in the “Discount, Variety Stores/Retail” industry. The company’s superior performance is demonstrated through the fact that it was America’s largest company (in terms of revenue) in 2002, and the reputation of the company is reflected in the opinion of “Fortune” who have identified Wal-Mart as one of the world’s most admired companies. In 2004 Wal-Mart had been hiring 1.4 million employees – making it the largest corporation in the world. Wal-Mart’s share prices have also been stable at time of stock market volatility. There are