Contrast of Carrefour and Wal-Mart Essay

Since the American entrepreneur, Cl arnce Saunders, opens his first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1916, the pattern of self-service store has swept the globe. With the largest population in the world, China is evaluate to be the worlds biggest sell market place which is now already the worlds fastest-growing market. ( Anon, 20111) As the worlds first and second gear largest retail groups, crossbreeding and Wal-Mart are single their way piling in. However, with 5000 old age of traditional history and 30 years of planned economy, china has already formed its own market tradition.Though, the devil giants both need to demo the special Chinese market, in some aspects, they physical exercise various strategies and devour different market feedback. This essay allow illustrate the similar strategies the two retail groups sacrifice been using and also analyze the ways they use to adapt to the Chinese market differently. To begin with, for opening the Chinese mar ket, ford and Wal-Mart both choose to befriend with the topical anaesthetic commercial. $1 billion was given over to Wal-Marts 100 hypermarkets supply chain, ranging from food to electronics (Shu-Ching, 2010, P. 1). Similarly, Carrefour also move to adapt to topical anaesthetic conditions, i. . cooperate with Lianhua Supermarket Company in Shanghai. The reasons why they cooperate with local partners is non just because of the legal considerations, but also to have a deep understanding of the difficult and complex Chinese market (Peter, 2006, P. 6).Nevertheless, they use different strategies according to different company development plan. Wal-Mart focuses much on the long term partnership nationally or horizontal internationally. Considering the different regional culture and local policy, Carrefour changes partnerships by local markets (Peter, 2006, P. ). Furthermore, Carrefour adopts different strategy throughout all its global market, counsel on locally sourced product s, as well as its local prudence teams, which are almost comprised of domestic employees to be more familiar with the local tastes. Also, on purchasing larger market shares, expansion strategy is prevalent used by the two retail market giants. Since Carrefour open up its first store in china in 1995, it has already operated 73 hypermarkets in 29 cities which makes about $2 billion profit (Peter, 2006, P. ).Likely, 338 shops in 124 cities makes Wal-Mart $7 billion annually which is just a little piece of music lower than whole Carrefour shops profit (Anon, 2011, P. 2). Moreover, they both regard second- and third-tier cities as a good growth opportunity, and have already built shops in western cities which are not so developed. Even though, they perform different strategies in expanding their market. Firstly, Wal-Mart aims at making central distribution center, while local distributors are more considered by Carrefour.Secondly, hypermarkets often constitute larger obtain and en tertainment complexes, therefore, a large amount of Carrefour stores are built at the city center for customers to go by foot or by bike. Comparing to this, edge-of-town is where Wal-Mart outlets often located, where customers can have large lay facilities or even shuttle bus provided (Moreau, 2008, P. 1). Last but not the least, Carrefour builds its stores ground on the constitutional expansion primarily. By contrast, Wal-Mart combines organic growth with large-scale acquisitions, which leads to its Chinese revenues doubled.Lastly, to perform well in Chinese tradition market, Carrefour and Wal-Mart both have their changes in shops and marketing. On the one hand, for saving a million yuan in electricity and irrigate costs, two retail chains common aim is to achieving zero-carbon stores by bordering year, which forces them to open a range of new energy saving stores in China, such as using waste gas to heat pissing and fluorescent lights, making use of natural lighting and inte grating energy-saving technologies (Anon, 2009). On the other hand, to discover new growth areas in retail profit, sell medicine has been put on the agenda.The two giants have already been in close contract with the Ministry of Commerce on the medicine retail line of products and affirming that worlds largest retailers distribution network will be covered by medicine sales (Anon, 2005). Although there are a lot of similar strategies in market development, the two retail groups also have their different development focus. In the first place, Wal-Mart awards its employees based on profit-sharing stock, which will improve employees skills, trust and constant work, while Carrefour focus more on salaries.In addition, Carrefour adopted a multi-format strategy, i. e. open smaller outlets in the discount format to create some other profit growth, while Wal-Mart develops its presence in the hypermarkets format exclusively (Moreau, 2008, P. 3). In details, proved to be a dynamic format com peting against hypermarkets operators, department stores agitate a CAGR increase of 9%, 2002-2007. Therefore, department stores sales continue to be boosted by the expansion period decided by Carrefour (Moreau, 2008, P. 2).