Word: marteli
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Global sourcing can provide the ammunition Wal-Mart will need to wage price wars against such powerful retailers as France's Carrefour, Holland's Royal Ahold and Germany's Makro. Each of these European companies got to foreign markets long before Wal-Mart...
...ASDA, the British chain Wal-Mart bought in mid-1999, the company was selling men's jeans for about $24 after paying $14 per yd. for 50,000 yds. of material to make them. Then the buy was moved to Bentonville, and the conversation went something like, "We'd like 6 million yds., please. Now what's your price?" Try $4.77 per yd. As a result, ASDA slashed its retail prices in half and upped its annual jeans sales to 1 million, from 174,000. ASDA is acquiring some 2,000 products from Wal-Mart's global network...
...traffic is not all one way. ASDA's George brand of apparel is one of the most popular private-label lines in Britain, and Wal-Mart recently launched it in the U.S. "We're selling apparel anyway," says Claire Watts, Wal-Mart's fashion boss. "Would it kill us to be a little more up to date?" Designers from ASDA and from Wal-Mart headquarters now go on trend-spotting trips together, an exercise associated more with hip brands like Nike, and one that sounds perilously outside Wal-Mart's core competency. Watts insists that her group isn't trying...
...Mart's expansion has gone well in Mexico, where it is the country's largest retailer. And the company just completed a deal to crack the Japanese market by acquiring 34% of Seiyu, a well-positioned but struggling retailer. But Wal-Mart has stumbled badly in some countries, particularly Germany. "We could write a training manual about our experiences in Germany," Scott says. "We really did more things wrong than right." There, Wal-Mart faces tough competition from well-established chains, especially among grocers. The German managers Wal-Mart brought on board through two mergers resisted American help...
...From Wal-Mart's point of view, it's the Chinese who have turned out to be the best capitalists. At the store in Shenzhen, local managers hold Ping-Pong tourneys, stage fashion shows and have clerks hawk products like paper towels in front of a large display. And that's just on Tuesday. The store even has its own fight song ("My heart is filled with pride...I long to tell you how deep my love for Wal-Mart...