Walmart Swot Analysis Paper

For as long as I can remember I have seen Wal-mart stores up in almost in every town that I have traveled through. The store started by Sam Walton was first established in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1962. Now Wal-mart has over 3,300 stores nationwide and they are the leading retail store in the country. With Wal-mart competing with Target and K-mart hold over 85 percent of the discount store market share. Although Sam Walton has passed on Wal-Mart has continued to stay successful and maintain at the top of the retail market. A new CEO took over and he has continued to maintain as the largest corporation in the nation. "Wal-mart has two objectives that they focus on: 1) Providing the customers what they want, when they want it, all at a value 2) treating each other as we would hope to be treated, acknowledging our total dependency on our
Although it seems that Wal-Mart has few threats to consider, it must still consider them in order to remain one of the best in the industry. These threats include increased competition, economic uncertainty, unions, and government regulation. The discount variety store industry is a fiercely competing marketplace and the big players are always strategically placed to gain new customers from the competition. Wal-Mart must keep an eye on its competitors, such as Kmart, Costco, and Target. Economic uncertainty, threat of unions, and government regulation can all be found in regions such as Germany. Germany has one of the highest degrees of unions and this has a profound effect on hiring, retaining, and laying off employees. Unions make it hard for a company to decide on its labor force requirements because once an employee is hired, it costs more in Germany to keep the employee on payroll and to lay off the employee. German workers are one of the highest paid workers in the world. A country that has had stagnant sales for the past four years also compounds these