Walmart Core Competency
Question 1
Introduction
Wal-Mart is which started from a humble store in Ozarks is now one of the largest corporations in the America. The success of Wal-Mart is mainly due to its core competences. Core competences are valuable, rare, costly to imitate and non-substitutable. Before identifying core competencies of Wal-Mart the resources and capabilities must be identified.
Tangible Resources
1) Financial Resources
Wal-Mart has the ability to generate internal funds. This is evident in Exhibit 3.
In the year of 2007, net income has increase to 11.709 billion as compared to 11.555 billion in 2006.
The current ratio of Wal-Mart is at 0.9 which means that the firm is able to meet 90% of its current financial liabilities. Hitt etal, pg 291 Exhibit 10
2) Organizational Resources
With 3 business segments namely, Wal-Mart Stores, Sam’s club and Wal-Mart International, it is deem no easy feat to manage the thousands of stores. Hence, the 25 senior Wal-Mart officers (Hitt etal, pg 289) stationed around the globe meet up via video conferences weekly to discuss, review the company’s ongoing performance, focus on issues which needs to address and ways to boost the company’s revenue. Its hierchary of 25 officers are formed by 14 board of directors responsible in planning, controlling and coordinating of their each individual scope and 8 senior officers supporting.
3) Physical Resources
Wal-Mart has 6783 stores worldwide in 3 segments Wal-Mart stores, Sam’s club and Wal-mart international. There are three retail formats which include 2257 Supercenters, 1074 Discount stores and 112 Neighbourhood Markets spread over 50 states in America and 2769 international stores. Wal-Mart Stores are strategically located for example Sam’s club and supercentres are located at prime spots whereas neighbourhood markets are located within the neighbourhood to attract different segments of consumers.
Wal-Mart has a 1600 member Global Procurement Service team based in 23...
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