Wal-Mart wants you to think of it as a technology company

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Andria Cheng adopted from Marketwatch.com

Neil Ashe, president and  CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s /quotes/zigman/245476/quotes/nls/wmtWMT+0.08% global eCommerce business, likes it when he heard description of Wal-Mart as a technology company.

He may have a good reason to do so.

Wal-Mart’s seeking to gain ground against its larger Web rival Amazon.com Inc. /quotes/zigman/63011/quotes/nls/amznAMZN+0.71%. It’s also figuring out how to increase its share of the market with more consumers toting mobile devices and comparison shopping online.

The company is also hoping its global database of customer information will give it a better read on consumers. In the past 18 months, Wal-Mart has built or expanded three technology centers in San Bruno, California; Bangalore and Sao Paulo. In the San Bruno and San Francisco Bay area, a 1,500-people global online commerce unit has been installed, separate from the corporate home base in Bentonville.

“Ecom is the next growth engine for Wal-Mart,” Ashe said at a Barclays Capital conference on Wednesday. “We have global leverage, not just in cost and capital investment, but innovation leverage.”

For example, Wal-Mart’s been testing same-day grocery delivery service in the Bay area with some know-how from its sister chain Asda in the U.K., which already delivers groceries across most of the U.K. and the No. 2 online grocer in that country, spokesman Dan Toporek told MarketWatch.
Wal-Mart, however, has a lot of catching up to do on the online front. The company, which analysts estimate will reach $490 billion in sales this year, in October projected its online sales would only reach $9 billion this year. In comparison, Wall Street estimated Amazon would rack up almost $75 billion in sales. Other retailers such as Williams-Sonoma /quotes/zigman/246567/quotes/nls/wsmWSM+0.91% generated a significantly higher percentage of their sales online.

Among some of its initiatives, Wal-Mart’s tech team will now constantly update its home page and search functions to make it easier and more interesting to shop. Over the next two days, for instance, Walmart.com in the U.S. is rolling out a new home page design that includes features that shows what’s trending on its site, including on a local store level.

While Wal-Mart is behind on the initiative compared to its retail counterparts such as Home Depot Inc. /quotes/zigman/229488/quotes/nls/hdHD+0.57%, the company this year also began to give credit to stores for online sales generated in their local area to encourage employees to help customers in stores find things online.
The company’s team also developed a tool last year that will allow it to compare its prices online on a real time basis against its rivals and adjust instantly, compared to in the past when it wasn’t as frequent or had to be done manually, Toporek said.

– Andria Cheng
– Follow her on twitter @AndriaCheng

18 Amazing Facts About Wal-Mart

by:  Sheldon Barry Cwinn (adapted from Business insider.com)

Sometimes we forget just how amazing Wal-Mart actually is. These crazy 18 facts will allow you to understand the enormity of Wal-Mart as a global corporation....


1- In fiscal year 2012, Wal-Mart registered approximately $444 billion in sales, which is $20 billion more than Austria's GDP. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be the 26th largest economy in the world. 

2 - Wal-Mart has more employees worldwide — 2.2 million — than the population of Houston. The mega-retailer employs 1.4 million people in the U.S. alone.

3 - If Wal-Mart was an army, it would have the second largest military in the world, behind China

4 - Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot, Kroger, Target, Sears, Costco, and K-Mart combined.

5 -The average family of four spends over $4,000 a year at Wal-Mart.

6 - Each week, Wal-Mart serves more than 200 million customers at more than 10,400 stores in 27 countries.

7 - One of every four dollars Americans spend on groceries is spent at Wal-Mart.

8 - In 2010, CEO Michael Duke's annual salary of $35 million earned him more in an hour than a full-time employee makes in an entire year.

9 - In 2009, Walmart sold more bananas than any other item.

10 - China's exports to Walmart accounted for 11 percent of the growth of the total U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2006.

11 - If  Wal-Mart's more than 900 million square feet of retail space were spread out over one place it would take up roughly 34 miles, which is about 1.5 times the size of Manhattan.

12 - Wal-Mart parking lots alone take up roughly the size of Tampa, Florida.

13 - In the year 2000 Wal-Mart was sued 4,869 times, or about one lawsuit every 2 hours.

14 - 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart store.

15 - The Walton family has given away about 2% of its net worth to charity. Bill Gates has given 48%. Warren Buffet has given away 78%.

16 - An additional Wal-Mart Supercenter per 100,000 residents increases average BMI by 0.25 units and the obesity rate by 2.4 percent.

17 - The most frequent destination typed into the GPS TeleNav is Wal-Mart

18 - Roughly 4,700 (about 90 percent) of international stores operate under a banner other than Wal-Mart, including Walmex in Mexico, Asda in the UK, Seiyu in Japan, and Best Price in India.