This article feels like an article designed to pressure Marc Lore to leave.
Losing $1B on $22B in revenue, after just 3 years of really starting this bet is nothing!
Makes me think Marc Lore has run afoul of and/or transgressed some ideological prime directive and this is a hit job.
Lore is operating like a startup, not focused on short-term profits.
Meanwhile, Walmart's US CEO, Greg Foran has his compensation tied to annual results, which include Lore's operations.
If accurate, this reads like Incentives 101, and it reflects poorly on Doug McMillon, Walmart's overall CEO.
Their products aren't even that good, surely more of them aren't going to hold up to online competition either.
I also never got the feeling that walmart shoppers are "i need same day delivery" types. they're in it for the bargains. You tell them an option is going to be slightly cheaper, they'll go for it.
I feel like they should keep the focus on their brick and mortar stores and forget about trying to compete with amazon.
Buying something from Wal-Mart is far from a seal of quality.
Yay, WalMart! (And Best Buy, for that matter- their online pick-it-up-in-five-minutes option is amazing.)
Their deliveries are on point, the self checkout works perfectly, they're even a store pick up service where you just pull up to designated parking stops and the attendants load up your trunk with order which is ready by time you arrive at the shop.
It's a lot harder to get your product on a Walmart shelf than having it listed on Amazon. There's an existential quality assurance when you buy from Walmart than Amazon.
1996: -$6.4m on $15.7m sales || 1997: -$32m on $147m sales || 1998: -$109m on $609m sales || 1999: -$605m on $1.63b sales || 2000: -$863m on $2.76b sales || 2001: -$412m on $3.12b sales
In 2002, as a forced result of the dotcom crash and stock market plunge (their ability to continue to fund such red ink was in question), they had to expedite getting to operating break-even and turned off the spending spree they were using to get big artificially fast. They turned a $64m operating profit in 2002 on $3.9b in sales. Positive operating income climbed to $440m by 2004.
They may have been unattractive by wall street's standards (eg. Pay outs) but they were far from unprofitable.
Amazon lost about $2 billion in their first six years of operations.
And Walmart's online presence would be profitable now if they weren't investing heavily in infrastructure (20 fulfillment centers trying to catch up to Amazon's 110) and new services (online catalog to match Amazon's).