milestone two rough draft
Running Head: WALMART !1
Company overview
Walmart Inc is a retail company with multinational branches and its headquarters are in
Bentonville, Arkansas. The company runs a chain of retail stores in twenty-seven countries. As of the
end of 2020, Walmart had 11,510 stores and clubs located all over the twenty-seven countries. This
company is the world's largest company based on revenue and the leading private employer in the world.
The organization had a gain of over $514 billion as of 2019, according to the fortune global 500 list.
Walmart has over two million employees (Alam, 2020).
Specific insights on Walmart’s retail business
Walmart inc is an international retail business that has both physical and online stores. The retail
stores owned by Walmart provide a wide variety of products include foodstuffs, electronics, mobile
phones, household items, beauty products, among many others. The online retail stores offer delivery for
goods ordered at a fee. Walmart has super centers that operate for 24 hours and provide specialty shops
like salons and banks. Discount stores are small than the super centers and offer a wide variety of goods.
They also have neighborhood markets that offer affordable goods. They have many distribution centers
and a fleet of trucks to move the goods.
SWOT ANALYSIS
Walmart derives its strengths from its scale of operation. The company's main strength is its
immense size; it gives the company access to a lot of funds. The organization can use the funds to grow
and expand the business through opening new branches. Walmart has an efficient supply chain enhanced
by technological advancement (Collis et al., 2018). This shields the company from market risks such as
the disruption of the supply chain. These strengths give Walmart a competitive advantage over its smaller
competitors.
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Despite the company being the largest retailer, it has weaknesses, which give it a challenge
dealing with its threats. The company uses a cost leadership strategy; it sells at very low prices and has
very thin profit margins. The cost leadership strategy makes its business model easy to imitate. Apart
from the organizational size and the low prices, Walmart lacks any other specific competitive
differentiators to differentiate their products from competitors. This makes them unable to compete with
high-end retailers that attract customers who are after quality instead of pricing.
Walmart has various opportunities for growth and improvement. It has an opportunity of
expanding to developing countries. Due to the low economic growth in developing countries, there is a
high demand for cheaper products. The organization has an opportunity to improve its Human Resource
practices. A lot of criticism has been made on the quality of employees of the organization; Walmart has
the opportunity to work on them and employ high-quality employees. Walmart also has the opportunity to
address the health and quality standards of its products.
Some threats risk the business performance of Walmart going down. People are turning into
healthy lifestyles, and most of Walmart's products are perceived as unhealthy (Vlados, 2019). Another
threat is that new and existing retailers might use aggressive marketing strategies to attract their
customers. Both large and small retailers threaten Walmart. Large retailers can attract and retain
customers. On the other hand, small scale retailers can use personal websites and platforms to convince
consumers to buy from them. These threats should push the company to make changes to its competitive
strategies.
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References
Alam, S. (2020). Retail Business Organization. Financial Performance and Valuation of
“Walmart” in the USA. GRIN Verlag.
Collis, D. A. V. I. D., Wu, A., Koning, R., & Sun, H. C. (2018). Walmart Inc. takes on Amazon.
com. Harv. Bus. Sch. Publ, 30.
Vlados, C. (2019). On a correlative and evolutionary SWOT analysis. Journal of Strategy and
Management.