Yahoo Finance Walmart – From Retail Giant To E-Commerce Titan
Interested In Walmart? What Investors Need To Know (Part 15 of 28)
Walmart’s e-commerce growth
Walmart (WMT) operates e-commerce sites in 11 countries—including the US. For most organizations, $10 billion in annual e-commerce sales would be considered significant. At Walmart that’s only about 2% of the total sales!
It doesn’t mean that the retailer (XRT) isn’t taking the channel seriously. There are an estimated 600 million e-commerce visitors per quarter in Walmart’s US segment alone. Walmart is looking at channel sales of ~$12.5 billion in fiscal year 2015. Outside the US, Walmart is concentrating on the e-commerce markets in China, the United Kingdom, and Brazil.
In comparison, Target (TGT) generated online sales of $2.3 billion in 2013. Costco (COST) reported online sales of ~$3 billion in the year ending October 5, 2015. Meanwhile, e-retailer Amazon (AMZN) reported web sales of ~$67 billion in 2013.
Strategy overview
Walmart has been busy improving its digital and mobile shopping interface. Recently, it also developed a new shopper recommendation engine to personalize product searches. Over the past two years, Walmart increased the number of products available online by three times in the US. Over the past year, Walmart increased the number of products available by ten times in Brazil and two times in China.
@WalmartLabs
Walmart has also set up its own tech base in Silicon Valley @WalmartLabs. This is one of the most important drivers for Walmart’s e-commerce sales. @WalmartLabs has been increasing its tech team. It acquired several tech companies to develop its global technology platform. @WalmartLabs purchased four startups last year. The latest was Luvocracy. Walmart purchased it in July 2014.
These purchases are intended to improve the company’s mobile sites. They will also improve the search and analytics aspects. Some purchases have been made purely to acquire talented individuals in the field.
In the next part of this series, we’ll discuss how Walmart stacks up against online retailers—like Amazon.
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