Walmart in China: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart entered the Chinese market in 1996 and opened its first store in Shenzhen, Guangdong. From the very beginning, Walmart adopted a different expansion strategy from other international (mainly Western European) retailers in China. Walmart expanded slowly in Southern China and focused on medium-sized cities while other international retailers expanded rapidly in large cities in East China. Since 2001, Walmart has expedited its store network growth and expanded nationwide. Although Walmart was not the largest or most profitable international retailer in China for quite a long time, it managed to achieve the largest store network and diversify its retail format. Walmart also survived the recent wave of divestment of international retailers in China. This paper aims to analyze Walmart’s expansion strategies in China from the perspective of the multidimensional embeddedness in economic geography and identify the changing spatial-temporal patterns of such expansion.