“Wal-Mart in South Korea” While I was researching companies that failed overseas I seen quite a few that kind of surprised me. One the really shocked me though was seeing that Wal-Mart failed. Wal-Mart is very successful in the US and a lot of other countries but one that it could not replicate its success was South Korea. Wal-Mart entered the South Korean market in 1998 and struggled to make the profits that it wanted to. According to Choe Sang-Hun’s article “Wal-Mart Selling Stores and Leaving South Korea”, He states “Wal-Mart which entered the country in 1998, put off South Korean consumers by sticking to Western marketing strategies that concentrated on dry goods, from electronics to clothing, while their local rivals focused on food and beverages, the segment that specialists say attracts South Koreans to hypermarkets”. Sang-Hun also goes on to mention that Wal-Mart sold its products by the box which is pretty much how they do it here, when most of the successful retailers in South Korea use eye catching ads and clerks that use megaphones and hand-clapping to grab the attention of buyers. Like I mentioned before I am very surprised that Wal-Mart actually failed in a market. Especially since in the US Wal-Mart has taken over everything else and put a lot of their rivals out of business. I feel that I should have been simple for Wal-Mart to succeed; they should have researched the market more and tried to look at what the competition was doing to sell their products. Although with most companies when they have a combo that works in other markets they usually assume that the same strategy will work in all markets. If Wal-Mart would have went and asked the South Korean consumer what it looks for when they go into a store to buy products and could have setup displays and stores to cater to their needs it wouldn’t have had a problem.

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Sang-Hun,