Walmart Mexico under new boss “not just a retailer”

Walmart Mexico new boss aims to double its sales despite strong competition in e-commerce.

Ignacio Caridewho has worked for the online retailer for more than a decade Free market before becoming CEO of Walmart Mexico – or Walmex – he discussed his vision of the company on Sunday (25 August) in a interview at the Financial Times (FT).

“Walmex is changing, it is not a retailer more ... (or) it’s not just that,” he said. “We’re building a whole ecosystem around this core business, which is very important.”

According to the report, Caride aims to create a seamless experience between physical and online shopping while improving Walmex’s ability to offer cross-selling propositions such as financial services and healthcare, with the goal of helping the company double its revenue. yearly Revenues will rise to around 1.8 trillion pesos (or about $93 billion) over the next nine years.

The FT noted that there is a wealth of opportunity in the online shopping space as Mexico – a middle-income country with a younger population base — is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world.

However, much of the market share is held by Amazon and Mercado Libre. A report by Mexico’s antitrust authority Cofece this year found that the two companies Control 85% of the country e-Shopping and called on the government to order Amazon and Mercado Libre to take “corrective measures” to ensure competition in the online shopping market.

In the meantime, the challenge for Caribe is to To Transforming a retailer with outdated IT into something that can play on equal terms with its digitally focused competitors, the FT report says.

“Our big debt in the digital world is technology,” he said. “We’re such a big company with so many systems that we call them legacy systems because they were built for a retail mentality, and today we have to modernize them.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that 62% of buyers in Mexico are looking for digital features that are not always available, prompting merchants to try to address this digital deficit.

“The reason why buyers in Mexico want digital shopping functions is that they often enable consumers to save money and improve their overall in-store experience,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

“In other words – just as we found when studying consumer behavior in Brazil, the UK, the US And elsewhere – these local shoppers also enjoy enriching their brick-and-mortar shopping experiences with digital features: an approach to buying our research calls Click-and-Mortar™ shopping.”

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