University of Phoenix
Strategic Initiative Paper
Alex Money
Jermaine Bailey
Micheal Maddox
Rosie Burton
FIN370 – Edward Hastings
Week Three – June 15th 2011
WALMART
Walmart’s annual report is a comprehensive look at the company's activities throughout the preceding year. Walmart’s annual reports are intended to give shareholders and others, who are financially affiliated, information about the company's activities and financial performance. Also within such a comprehensive report would be plans to attack certain strategic agendas in reference to the company’s long term outlook. Identifying the long-term strategic planning initiative of Walmart will be the focus of this paper. The reader should be able to
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Change in one of the market risk may result in changes in another, which can affect how Walmart price the product for consumers and it also affect the value of the cost leadership initiatives. By using cost leadership to leverage operating expenses, increasing productivity and sourcing goods globally at low, low cost will maximize returns on capital invested. Walmart execute a tight financial expense control and a strong inventory management along with cost leadership and financial discipline will gives Walmart more profitable returns (Walmart 2010 annual report). In closing, Team C has evaluated Walmart’s annual report to identify relevant strategic planning initiatives as well as to gain a better understanding of how the Walmart organization uses strategic planning to their benefit. We have discovered the extreme efficiency of using such a tool as cost leadership, and how Walmart uses this tool to dominate the competition and strive as the industry leader in providing quality products at discount prices. This combination proves to maximize profits as Walmart continues to effectively utilize global sourcing policies while minimizing the collective risk associated within.
References
Walmart annual report (2010). Retrieved from http://cdn.walmartstores.com/sites/AnnualReport/2010/PDF/WMT_2010AR_FINAL.pdf
Leadership. Retrieved on 06/13/2011 Zanebooks (2011). Cost
Her success has recently come in 2011. My plan is to open a second sleep study in San Antonio, Texas. Roxanne will continue to manage the center in Corpus Christ and will help me virtually manage the San Antonio location. Because Roxanne has the information needed to model her sleep center it will be much easier to open up my own sleep evaluation center based on her proposal.
As the leading discount retailer in the United States, WalMart (NYSE:WMT) has consistently shown an exceptional ability to master the complexities of logistics, supply chain management, retailing and pricing management. The WalMart supply chain is among the most advanced and sophisticated in its use of analytics and information systems globally, often computing pricing variation and analysis literally overnight based on satellite uploads of information (WalMart Investor Relations, 2013). WalMart has also successfully taken a capital-intensive business model and transformed it into a retailing business capable of generating high profitability from low margin products based one efficiency alone (Zhu, Singh, Manuszak, 2009). WalMart is also one of the most-researched companies in the world, and continues to provide in-depth financial data on their Investor Relations site (WalMart Investor Relations, 2013). The purpose of this analysis is to evaluate the mission, vision, and overall strategy of WalMart and also define three objectives for improving the organization's financial position, showing how the objectives defined relate to the mission, vision and strategy of the company. In addition for each objective, meaningful performance measures are provided in addition to defined expected level of performance as well. For each of the objectives chosen at least one new
The purpose of this business report is to gain familiarity with Wal-Mart and to learn about the different aspects that make Wal-Mart a successful company. This report gives an in-depth analysis of the company history, services and products provided, the company philosophy, business methods, organizational structure, and financial and competitive analysis.
Strategy management is the key to success in any organization. However, without the proper strategy and implementation, it is difficult for any business to survive regardless of the industry or the size of the company. The largest retail company in the world is Walmart. The success of Walmart is because of its sound strategic management decisions and it ability to implement its strategic decision. A major factor in the continued growth is the rapid growth strategy. The future for Walmart looks bright. Increasing profits and recognizing social and ethical responsibilities will provide Walmart with a comfortable
This section will examine Wal-Mart 's company strategy in several sections. Three elements of successful strategy formulation and a fourth element, which exemplifies the implementation process of company strategy, will be looked at. Followed by this, an analysis of key factors contributing to this strategy will be detailed. These include looking at Wal-Mart 's competitive strategy, the CEO 's leadership, and company strategy strengths and weakness assessment.
Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, believes that “Give what customers want, and a little more” helps an organization to become successful (“10 Rules for Building a Business,” n.d.). Influenced by Walton, Walmart set its mission as “Saving people money so they can live better” as it knows that customers want to have a great shopping experience while saving money. To achieve its mission, Walmart applies cost leadership strategy. Cost leadership strategy is a strategy that an organization competes on the basis of having the lowest cost in its industry. Walmart has using this strategy for more than 50 years since it established. In fiscal 2016, Walmart continue to reducing its cost by starting a cost analytics program in Canada and the U.K. to provide merchants with tools and cost visibility to lead fact-based negotiations with suppliers (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.,
In business, three major strategies comprising of cost leadership, differentiation, and focus strategies exist. The focus strategy emphasizes on providing services and products to a specified buyer group or market segment within a given geographic market. The differentiation approach is often defined as provision of services or products that are perceived to be unique in the market place. Wal-Mart emphasizes on the long-term strategy of cost leadership. Through this strategy, the company ensures that it offers customers with quality products at relatively lower prices than other providers in the industry. Through overall cost leadership strategy, Wal-Mart has been offering better quality products at a lower price than any competitor can offer. For the organization to achieve this goal, it has developed long-term supply chain management, which ensures that products are made available to the market at the required time (Enz, 2010).
In 2014, Walmart announced a new president and CEO, Doug McMillion. McMillion had the duty of taking over the world’s largest company in respect to revenue, $473 billion, and the world’s largest private employer, 2.2 million associates. As it turned out, under McMillion’s leadership, in 2015 Walmart experienced the first decline in its annual sales ever. Many people had predicted that Walmart’s better days had been behind them when McMillion became president. As a result of this decline in annual sales, people questioned whether or not Walmart could return to the usual type of growth in sales it had essentially earned every year since it’s founding in 1962. To answer this question, some possibly issues with the management and strategy of Walmart’s business needed to be looked at in depth. Some of these most important issues included: the recent increase in retail sales of the online market compared to the discount retailer market, the state of Walmart’s international business, and the lacking performance of Walmart’s Discount Store, SAM’s Clubs, and Neighborhood Markets compared to their Supercenters.
In many organizations, the first step in strategic planning is the creation or updating of the agency’s strategic philosophy (Garner, 2005). This is typically completed by reviewing or creating a mission statement. Many variations of mission statements exist and vary from agency to agency. Most mission statements will contain one or all of these five elements: 1) Purpose, 2) Vision, 3) Strategy, 4) Values, and 5) Standards (Wilkinson & Monkhouse, 1994).
The two economic terms I select so as to learn more about Wal-Mart are resources and choice as well as tradeoff. They both apply to the retailer. When it comes to resources, these are the things that a business makes use of in the course of its operations. Resources include but they are not limited to capital and labor i.e. human resources. When it comes to Wal-Mart, one of the company's most important resources are its employees. According to Yahoo Finance (2012), the retailer currently has approximately 2, 200, 000 full time employees. The entity's current C.E.O is Michael Terry Duke (Yahoo Finance 2012). Regarding choice and tradeoff, it is important to note that any business entity is usually faced with a wide range of choices as well as courses of action. However, choice and tradeoff dictate that the business chooses only one course of action from all the available choices. In the case of Wal-Mart, the entity chose to adopt the cost leadership strategy as opposed to any of Porter's other generic
Cost Leadership is Walmart’s generic strategy. Walmart’s focus is on maintaining low prices of goods and services. Walmart is known for low prices, which is the main selling point of the business. The company keeps its prices low through cost reduction in operations.
This research paper will present the history and background of Wal-Mart. The review will describe and evaluate the resources that will provide additional understanding of the corporate operations and its management strategies. A SWOT analysis will be provided which will identify specific areas that can impact the outcome of the organization’s success and potential hazards. Upon conclusion, recommendations will be presented that will help Wal-Mart continue its competitive advantage. This paper will utilize qualitative methods, which will include, reviewing journal articles, reading other pertinent literature, analyzing online corporate records and other respected resources.
Walmart is a company that most people have heard of; it is one of the largest retail corporations with 11,527 retail units as of 29 February 2016, 4,573 within the United States, 651 Sam’s clubs, and 6,303 Walmart internationals.(“Our Locations,” n.d.) This report aims to take a brief look at the Walmart Corporation; it’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunity and threats along with an environmental analysis, five forces analysis and a look at strategy formation.
Wal-mart was founded by sam Walton in 1962. The idea behind was to bring discount shopping stores to rural America. It grew rapidly with huge popularity. Today it has 3708 Wal-mart U. S. Units, 569 U.S. Sam’s Club and 4112 International units. It toppled GE and became No.1 in Fortune 500 Company list with annual revenue of 405 Billion USD and employs about 2 million associates. It has presence in multiple sectors across retail industry like grocery, Auto, Pharmacy, Jewelry, Clothes, electronics, books etc. Let’s consider strategies in place and changes during last 25 years of Wal-mart.
In recent years, Walmart has established a total dominion over the retail business, and its influence has suffused throughout entirety of the global market. It has consistently used every option at its disposal to attain the endorsement of its customers. Ultimately, this has lead to it becoming, by a long shot, the largest company in the world by revenue, with approximately 486 billion dollars in 2017 to show for it (Fortune). But this did not happen by virtue of serendipity, and the reasons for this prosperity trace back to its rich history, universally appealing message, and far-sighted vision statement.