- Read the following case study and answer all the four questions:
Wal-Mart Foreign Expansion
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has built its success on a strategy of everyday low prices, and
highly efficient operations, logistics, and information systems that keep inventory to a minimum and
ensures against both overstocking and understocking. The company employs some 2.1 million people,
4
operates 4,200 stores in the United States and 3,600 in the rest of the world, and generates sales of
almost $400 billion (as of fiscal 2008). Approximately $91 billion of these sales were generated in 15
nations outside the United States.
Facing a slowdown in growth in the United States, Wal-Mart began its international expansion in the
early 1990s when it entered Mexico, teaming up in a joint venture with Cifra, Mexico’s largest retailer, to
open a series of supercentres that sell both groceries and general merchandise.
Initially the retailer hit some headwinds in Mexico. It quickly discovered that Mexicans shopping habits
were different. More people preferred to buy fresh produce at local stores, particularly items like meat,
tortillas and pan dulce which didn’t keep well overnight (many Mexicans lacked large refrigerators). Many
consumers also lacked cars, and did not buy in large volumes as consumers in the United States did.
Wal-Mart adjusted its strategy to meet the local conditions, hiring local managers who understood the
Mexican culture, letting those managers control merchandising strategy, building smaller stores that
people could walk to, and offering more fresh produce. At the same time, the company believed that it
could gradually change the shopping culture in Mexico, educating consumers by showing them the
benefits of its American merchandise culture. After all, Wal-Mart’s, managers reasoned, people once
shopped at small stores in the United States, but starting in the 1950s they increasingly gravitated
towards large stores like Wal-Mart.
As it built up its distribution systems in Mexico, Wal-Mart was able to lower its own costs, and it passed
these on to Mexican consumers in form of lower prices. The customisation, persistence and low-prices
paid off. Mexicans started to change their shopping habits. Today Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest retailer
and the country is widely considered to be the company’s most successful foreign venture.
Next Wal-Mart expanded into a number of developed nations, including Britain, Germany and South
Korea. There its expenses have been less successful. In all three countries it found itself going head to
head against well-established local rivals who had nicely matched their offerings to local shopping habits
and consumer preferences. Moreover, consumers in all three countries seemed to have preference for
higher quality merchandise and were not as attracted to Wal-Mart’s discount strategy as consumers in
the US and Mexico.
After years of losses, Wal-Mart pulled out of Germany and South Korea in 2006. At the same time it
continued to look for retailing opportunities elsewhere, particularly in developing nations where it lacked
strong local competitors, where it could gradually alter the shopping culture to its advantage, and where
its low price strategy was appealing.
Recently, the centrepiece of its international expansion efforts has been China. Wal-Mart opened its first
store in China in 1996, but initially expanded very slowly, and by 2006 had only 66 stores. What Wal-
Mart discovered, however, was the Chinese were bargain hunters, and open to the low price strategy
and wide selection offered at Wal-Mart stores. Indeed in terms of their shopping habits, the emerging
Chinese middle class seemed more like Americans than Europeans. But to succeed in China, Wal-Mart
also found it had to adapt its merchandising and operations strategy to mesh with Chinese culture.
One of the things that Wal-Mart learned is that Chinese consumers insist that food must be freshly
harvested, or even killed in front of them. Wal-Mart initially offended Chinese consumers by trying to sell
5
them dead fish, as well as meat packed in Styrofoam and cellophane. Shoppers turned their noses up at
what they saw as old merchandise. So Wal-Mart began to display the meat uncovered, installed fish
tanks into which shoppers could plunge fishing nets to pull out their evening meal, and began selling live
turtles for turtle soup. Sales soared.
Wal-Mart has also learned that in China, success requires it to embrace unions. Whereas in the United
States Wal-Mart has vigorously resisted unionisation, it came to the realisation that in China unions do
not bargain for labour contracts. Instead, they are an arm of the state, providing funding for the
Communist Party and (in the government’s view) securing social order. In mid-2006 Wal-Mart broke with
its longstanding antagonism to unions and agreed to allow unions in its Chinese stores.
Many believe this set the stage for Wal-Mart’s most recent move, the purchase in December 2006 of a
35 percent stake in the Trust-Mart chain, which has 101 hypermarkets in 34 cities across China. Now Wal-Mart has proclaimed that China lies at the centre of its growth strategy. By early 2009 Wal-Mart had some 243 stores in the country, and despite the global economic slowdown, the company insists that it will continue to open new stores in China at a “double digit rate”. (Hill, 2011)
Answer all four questions:
1. Through the use of country examples from the case, critically analyse the strategic and
environmental reasons why Wal-Mart engaged in internationalisation strategies and any potential
risks associated with such moves.
2. Evaluate how effective Wal-Mart’s staffing approach was in Mexico in relation to their strategic objectives in the country.
3. Analyse why Wal-Mart failed in South Korea and Germany and the differences between these
countries and Mexico?
4. Using appropriate theories, critically analyse the role of culture in International Business. Support your answer by quoting relevant examples from the case study.
