Walmart: Navigating a Changing Retail Landscape – Case Solution

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. Its CEO, Doug McMillon has prepared a strategy for overpowering the company's competitors within the retail industry and making the company the best retail store.

​Michael E. Porter and Jorge Ramirez-Vallejo
Harvard Business Review (717474-PDF-ENG)
March 06, 2017

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Case answers for Walmart: Navigating a Changing Retail Landscape

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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 who offered 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 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 offered groceries, bakery, fresh products, dairy products, electronic items, toys, apparel, and home furniture. The discount stores which are smaller in size compared to superstore and they offered groceries, electronic items, toys in limited counts. The Neighbourhood store offered items like fresh products, meat and dairy, health, and household items.

Their past strategy was to focus on physical large retail stores, but now they wanted 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 provide 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 the retail stores that sell all types of products needed for the customer’s daily needs, including from perishable to non-perishable goods.

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