Walmart 2016 Investment Community Meeting: Bentonville, Ar, October 6, 2016

Executive Summary

• On October 6, Fung Global Retail & Technology attended the Walmart 2016 Investment Community Meeting, held at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
• Before the meeting, Walmart reiterated its fiscal year 2017 EPS guidance, guided for flat EPS in fiscal 2018 and provided an $11 billion capital-spending target for fiscal 2018.
• The guidance for flat EPS in fiscal 2018 and for EPS growth at the low end of the 5%–10% target range suggests that Walmart is currently in a transition stage, feeling the brunt of the store closures and repositioning itself for to return to more normalized growth in fiscal 2019 and beyond.
• Walmart’s e-commerce strategy centers on leveraging the relative strengths of the superstores, Walmart.com and Jet.com, and in China, JD.com, in which the company recently doubled its investment.
• The food business was a recurring theme: management noted that Walmart needs to win in food in the US and that the company is the leading digitally enabled food retailer internationally.