How Could Wal Mart Continue Its Extraordinary Growth Management Essay
Introduction
The history of Wal-Mart started in 1962 with the opening of its first store in Arkansas, USA. The store stared as a retailer in the United States, but grew to reach extraordinary levels in the years to come. Wal-Mart grew rapidly, and used several methods to accomplish this growth. They opened their own stores as well as acquiring existing stores and chains to facilitate their entry to the new markets. The growth was not limited to the number of stores that the company opened, but it extended to the areas of operation for the store. For example, Wal-Mart entered new areas of business as it grew like pharmacies and jewelries. Wal-Mart followed an aggressive expansion strategy that was the model for their business for years, redefining concepts as they grew. But what is Wal-Mart.
The store can be described as the following. It is chain of discount department stores that operate with the purpose of reducing prices, and focusing on the volume of sales. The company’s growth is extraordinary in every sense; Wal-Mart is currently the world’s largest company by sales. Wal-Mart has recorded $260 billion in sales in 2005. The company manages over 5000 stores worldwide, 3200 of the stores located in the US, 900 in the Americas, 350 in Europe, and 440 in Asia. Wal-Mart employs a very large workforce, it has over 2 million employees, and the number is gradually increasing. Wal-Mart has adopted advance mean of technology to help it run its operations, this methods helped the growth of the company. But can Wal-Mart continue with the same level of growth. A company needs to maintain growth, and to Wal-Mart a reduction in the level of growth would be a cause of concern for the company’s stakeholders, because growth has a competitive advantage