A public company like Walmart, there's some people doing
some math here.
Yahoo also reported that it's writing down $482 million
in charges related to the declining value of Tumblr,
the social-blogging service that Yahoo acquired for
$1.1 billion in 2013.
and the company is writing off $7.6 billion related to
its acquisition of the Nokia phone business. That's more
than the $7.2 billion Microsoft paid for Nokia's phone
business last year.
1) A calculation of risk/reward on this investment
2) Determining whether result of 1 appropriately reflects Walmart's risk profile.
Given that Walmart decided to acquire, it is safe to assume this investment's risk of loss falls within Walmart's investment profile.
Translation: "I can't see how this deal makes sense but WalMart is a huge company so it has to make sense even if to me it doesn't".
By that logic no big company would ever fail or screw up. Every time there's a huge acquisition there are some people here making this fallacious argument or a variation of it. There are always people "doing some math" inside these companies, that doesn't mean that the success of any given strategy is a given.
The equation they're solving for is probably not, "How can we maximize Walmart's profits?", though. It's "How can I maximize my own immediate career goals?"