Business and Corporate-Level Strategies for Walmart

Wal-Mart’s sheer size gives it unrestrained economic power which allows it to drive down costs in the retail and manufacturing sectors and to enact its own standards with regards to its work force.

First of all Wal-Mart has many firms and few competitors since it owns Sam’s Club. Wal-Mart has majority of the same products just at lower prices. Wal-Mart isn’t unique in its own way seeing as they are many other supermarkets for example: Fred Meyers, Sears, Target, Kohl’s, and Costco are all supermarkets. Wal-Mart is more of an Oligopoly than any of the other structures.

The development of the Internet and more specifically the business website has seen brand recognition by consumers escalate to never before seen heights. Because of this brand recognition, it has become important for businesses to design their websites to reflect their overall marketing strategies. This is especially important in the retail world. All retail businesses have a similar overall marketing strategy of generating sales and retaining the customer for future sales. Most of the retail giants still greatly rely on the success of their brick and mortar stores to turn a profit. However, internet sales for these brick and mortar stores have increasingly risen over the last few years to compete with the retail stores like Amazon that are strictly internet based businesses. Brick and mortar retail stores, such as Walmart, Target, Kmart, and Nordstrom, have each designed their websites to reflect the overall retail marketing strategy as well as the individual marketing strategies that have made their brick and mortar businesses successful.

Wal-Mart was founded by businessman Sam Walton in 1962 as a small retail store in Arkansas, USA. From there it has grown to become the largest retail giant in the world. Ranked by Forbes 2000 list for 2011 as the 18th largest public corporation in the world, Wal-Mart is the highest revenue generating public entity in the world as of 31st January 2011, with gross revenue of 422 billion US Dollars (Walmart Annual Report, 2011). It is also noted for being the largest private employer in the world having just over 2 million employees serving in 8500 stores, in 15 different countries, under 55 different names, worldwide. (Daniel, 2010)

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. helps individuals around the globe spare cash and live better - at whatever time and anyplace - in retail locations, online and through their cell phones. Every week, more than 245 million clients and individuals visit our almost 11,000 stores under 65 flags in 28 nations and e-trade sites in 11 nations. With financial year 2015 net offers of $482.2 billion, Wal-Mart utilizes 2.2 million partners around the world. (Wal-Mart Corporate) Wal-Mart is a superpower in the business world and has been that way for 50+ years. Understanding how it got to this point and how it has maintained its successful business model starts with its

To be the world 's largest low cost store that carries all types of merchandise for all possible consumers.

“Always low prices”, is the first thing you think of when you think about one of the most successful companies around the world, Wal-Mart. For years they stand as a well know company due to their everyday low prices and variety of products. Their mission statement is “Saving people money so that they can live better”. They have chosen their mission statement wisely yet there is a lot of controversy when it comes to this International Company.

Having strong presence in the retail industry, the firm expanded business to offer second hand car. The firm leverage on its competencies to provide its own product to consumer. Also, Wal-Mart works heavily with its suppliers. This symbiotic relationship can be seen as vertical integration due to the level at which Wal-Mart analyses its suppliers and improves their manufacturing processes. Wal-Mart definitely has the business strategy of Low Cost Leadership. They do nothing to really differentiate themselves from competitors and provide no-frills self-service stores that always provide the lowest prices. Wal-Mart has built enough clout with suppliers that they can dictate the prices and go in and change suppliers manufacturing processes in order to wring out more and more savings for the consumer.

1. Do Wal Mart and K Mart exploit any merger and acquisition in recent 5-10 years?

Bonini, S. M., Mendoca, L. T., & Oppenheim, J. M. (2006). When Social Issues become strategic. McKinsey Quarterly, 20-32.

Successful corporations in today’s business world must be able to employ different levels of planning in order to achieve goals put in place by senior management. Wal-Mart has many different levels of management planning in place to follow through on its goals and objectives. There are many factors that influence Wal-Mart’s strategic, tactical, operational and contingency planning. Although Wal-Mart has been a very successful corporation throughout its existence, it has had to absorb the impact of legal issues, ethics, and corporate responsibility in its management planning.

by Matthew Boyle Thursday, October 15, 2009 Having grown in fits and starts, Wal-Mart 's international unit has a new game plan. Can it master world markets? It 's rare that a $100 billion business can be marginalized, but such is the case with the international arm of Wal-Mart Stores (WMT). As a standalone company, it would rank among the top five global retailers. Inside the $401 billion retail giant, though, the business has traditionally received short shrift. Its Bentonville (Ark.) headquarters is underwhelming—a drab, largely windowless, one-story structure named after Bill Mitchell, a former Walmart executive whom nobody seems to remember.

The five generic competitive strategies are low-cost provider, broad differentiation, focused low-cost, focused differentiation strategy, and best-cost provider strategy. According to the textbook, “a company’s competitive strategy deals exclusively with the specifics of management’s game plan for competing successfully” (Gamble, 93).

1-Force Wal-Mart points are explicitly acknowledged widely. With its size and access to capital, Wal-Mart can maintain even low-shop performance over the long term when you move to the area, a luxury not granted many small businesses, based on the family. Distribution and supply chain enables the efficient retailer to offer very low prices, which is difficult for competitors to match.

The mission and vision statement of Walmart are both long term. They want to make sure that customers continually go to the nearest Walmart in their places. Since Walmart tries to sell things at an affordable price they make sure that they still gain profit even if they sell at a lower price. Handling a lot of stores worldwide is hard for Walmart because there are different cultures to consider and different things that people want in that certain country. Walmart has to keep adjusting on the things they are selling so that they don’t lose in the competitive market. Now we all know that Walmart has different competitors all over the world, I will now be listing some of the top competitors of Walmart: