Wal-Mart: The Global Retailer
Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer. In fact, it's the world's largest company, with sales last year totaling nearly $220 billion. Of that total, $35.5 billion were from the fast-growing Wal-Mart International Division. Wal-Mart is growing at an incredible clip, both at home and abroad. In the early 1990s, its sales were a little less than $85 billion; it had 2,200 stores and no international division. Today, it has over 3,200 stores, with about 1,100 of them outside the United States. Even though Wal-Mart continues to open stores in the United States, the biggest opportunity for future growth lies in international expansion.
Wal-Mart first "went abroad" to Canada when it purchased 122 Canadian Woolco stores in 1993. By mid-2002, it had 196 stores in Canada, where it was ranked the best retailer and the ninth best company for which to work. Following its move north, the retailing giant turned south into Mexico, using joint ventures and sometimes......
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Approximate Word Count: 1777
Approximate Pages: 7 (260 words per double-spaced page) |