Walmart: Navigating a Changing Retail Landscape - Case Solution

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Introduction – Walmart: Navigating a Changing Retail Landscape

This case analysis is about the company “Walmart,” a leading retail store in the United States of America and other parts of the world. The first retail store was started in the year 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas, by Sam Walton. The company’s mission is to offer the customer a wide range of products at the lowest price.

Walmart is one of the first retailers to offer Self-service shopping in the US. They were not offering any promotional discounts like weekend discount sales, but they followed “everyday low price.”

Walmart’s operation is divided into three business units. All the activity in the US comes under Walmart US. All operation apart from the US comes under Walmart International, and the chain of warehouse comes under Sam’s Club.

Walmart’s operation in the US is further divided into various names based on the service provided in the stores and the store size. The superstore is the biggest one in space and offers groceries, bakery, fresh products, dairy products, electronic items, toys, apparel, and home furniture.

The discount stores are smaller in size compared to superstores, and they offer groceries, electronic items, and toys on limited counts. The Neighbourhood store offered items like fresh products, meat and dairy, health, and household items.

Their past strategy was to focus on large physical retail stores, but now they want to invest in the online store “Walmart.com” and also focus on their retail store with different sizes based on customer needs.

Their main goal is to reduce their cost by various means like buying in bulk, fuel efficiency, and providing products at a low price to customers. The market segment of Walmart is the retail store chain and e-commerce.

External Analysis

Porters Five Force

The Porter Five Forces analysis is used to understand the industry of retail stores that sell all types of products needed for the customer’s daily needs, including perishable and non-perishable goods.

So, based on the above data, the opportunity, threat, driving force, critical success factor, and survival requirement of the industry are analyzed and explained below.