What Has Been The Focus Of WAL-MART'S Board Of Directors?

The decline in the purchasing power of the recession caused the US sales to shrink.

WAL-MART's main contribution last year came from the international market.

In contrast, WAL-MART's annual sales in China are 11 billion 600 million US dollars, accounting for only 2.4% of global revenue, but it has grown significantly over the past 10 years.

China is still the fastest growing retail market in the world.

Just two days before announcing the appointment of Greg Penner as chairman of the board, in June 3rd, the core team of @Walmart labs of Sam headquarters of Benton Ville unveiled the mystery of WAL-MART in the field of e-commerce research and development.

@Walmart labs, founded in 2011, aims to pform data into useful information for decision making through precise mining of peak data generated by consumers on social networking sites, and to accurately push users through mobile terminals.

This is the beginning of WAL-MART big data mining.

At the beginning of the establishment of the laboratory, there are two main functions: first, data mining.

Analysis of consumers' interest in social networking, so as to predict their next purchase of products in walmart.com; second, the development of geo technology.

Engineers in the lab hope to develop a location application to guide users to find products of interest.

An experimental project they developed is store location and product search function, that is, to help shoppers find things they want to buy faster and more conveniently in the store.

This year, Walmart .Com online products increased from 1 million categories 4 years ago to more than 7 million, and will increase to 14 million in 2016.

These implementations are inseparable from WAL-MART's strong data support, which is the PangGrge system developed by @Walmart labs engineers for two and a half years.

"We have built our own cloud, merging the procurement system and supply system to make use of these information systems on mobile terminals.

This is what we did in the past two and a half years. "

WAL-MART global e-commerce CEO Neil said.

Neil revealed that in 2014, WAL-MART invested $1 billion in e-commerce, and most of the money was invested in the development and design of PangGrge, an e-commerce system.

WAL-MART's big data package can be used to refine sales data and sales details of 11457 stores in 27 countries.

Through the efforts of @Walmart labs engineers, these data will show the change of customers' consumption habits in detail through the computer system, from diffusion to concentration. Through data mining and analysis, different regions and shopping preferences can be obtained, providing the basis for purchasing and opening shop decisions.

This is what WAL-MART calls the terminal of the central nervous system.

"You see a point on this picture, maybe it is the research we made through 5 sheets of data."

@Walmart labs Engineer DAKO said.

@walmartlabs's achievements in big data mining include providing semantic search services -- adding social media content, expanding the knowledge reserve of search engines, and searching engines to better determine the context that users are looking for; using peak data on social networks to predict demand for goods, plating these data into useful information for decision making and pushing it to WAL-MART customers.

In order to better dig deeper into big data, WAL-MART has acquired many social networking sites and mobile technology businesses over the past 4 years, and launched its first Internet project incubator "Sam DATA coffee" last summer.

On the more specific content of the incubator, WAL-MART said it was temporarily confidential.

As early as 1996, WAL-MART opened its own e-commerce platform.

But it was not until 2007 that the service was delivered to the store - the customer could go online and go to the nearby store to pick up the goods.

In 2010, WAL-MART upgraded global e-commerce to a strategic level and set up a global e-commerce headquarters.

In 2011, WAL-MART board of Directors Committee on technology and electronic commerce was established.

WAL-MART's online sales rose from $1 billion 600 million in 2005 to $4 billion in 2011.

According to the latest earnings report, WAL-MART's global e-commerce sales in 2014 amounted to about 12 billion US dollars, which was 3 times that of 2011.

Despite a significant increase, WAL-MART's electricity provider's revenue is still less than half a quarter of Amazon's revenue.

At the analyst meeting after the general meeting of shareholders, a reporter asked whether the development of WAL-MART's electricity supplier was too slow. Is the acceleration of pformation affected by the competitive pressure brought by the Internet age? Doug McMillon, WAL-MART's global president and chief executive, responded that WAL-MART accelerated e-commerce because it was not because everyone was doing e-commerce, but because of the change of customers' shopping demand. "Investment in some areas can not see earthshaking changes in the eyes of Dong Minglun, but we are doing the right thing."

Dong Minglun stressed that in the past few years, WAL-MART has been investing in infrastructure construction of the electricity supplier business in the US and other international markets.

This includes the establishment of 4 large private e-commerce distribution centers in Pennsylvania, Texas and other places in the United States, with a distribution center of about 12 thousand square feet and 20 football fields.

The distribution capacity is 5 times that of the traditional distribution center.

"Each

Equipped with WAL-MART special pport convoy.

These e-commerce logistics centers will realize the optimal allocation of assets with highly automated and new warehouse processes, bringing the company 10% annual cost savings.

It did not disclose the data on the income and profit margins of the specific national electricity supplier business, but they said that 80% of the online orders came from repeat customers.

For example, the first batch of orders on WAL-MART Mexico line was completed through WAL-MART employees walking and taxis. Up to now, WAL-MART's online orders in Mexico have exceeded 1 million 300 thousand orders a year.

WAL-MART realized a profit of 27 billion US dollars in 2014, an increase of 1% over the previous year.

"1% profit growth is not easy," WAL-MART chief financial officer Charles Holly said at the shareholders' meeting.

Constrained by the general downturn in traditional retail industry, other retailers are hard to make profit growth.