Walmart China at 30: The No-gimmick Hard Work That Weathers Every Cycle

On August 12, 1996, Walmart's first Walmart Supercenter and Sam's Club in China opened on the same day in Shenzhen. Amid the festive sound of gongs and drums, Bob Martin, then President of Walmart, said to the camera, "Our primary goal is to come here and start the learning process. We must learn how to serve the consumers here and earn their trust."

That was an era when materials had just become abundant but choices were still limited. Most families had to shop behind counters and run to different stores to get all their daily necessities. Walmart brought in the concept of "self-service shopping" — dozens of products of the same category were displayed in a row for customers to choose freely, which was enough to reshape the consumption perception of a whole generation at that time.

Few people realized that this starting point would become a continuous reference frame for China's retail industry in the following three decades: this global retail giant is not only a participant in many rounds of retail reforms, but also often the benchmark for the industry to calibrate itself.

Thirty years later, the scene in supermarkets is completely different from the past. Consumers walk into supermarkets with their mobile phones, flip to the back of the package to check the ingredient list, and casually write down their likes or dislikes about a certain product on Xiaohongshu.

From 1996 to 2025, China's total retail sales of consumer goods increased from 2.46 trillion yuan to 50.1 trillion yuan, and per capita GDP increased by nearly 17 times. China has grown into the world's second largest consumer market, and the retail industry has also experienced multiple waves such as the rise of hypermarkets, the explosion of e-commerce, omni-channel integration, and the rational return of consumption.

During this period, many enterprises were swept along by the tides, or even eliminated. However, Walmart has consistently found its own position in every wave: it brought "self-selective shopping" to China and defined the starting point of modern retail; it took the lead in testing e-commerce and defined the prototype of omni-channel; now, through the reshaping of product strength and multi-format coordination, it is trying to redefine the connotation of "certainty" and "trust" in this more discerning era.

I. Opening in the Turbulent Current

The first store Walmart opened in Shenzhen was once a demonstration classroom for China's retail industry. At that time, China's per capita GDP was only 5,569 yuan, and local retail was still in an extensive development stage. A large number of enterprises traveled from all over the country to Shenzhen, studying every move of this "international giant" starting from the most basic shelf arrangement, category combination and customer flow line design.

The first thing Walmart brought to China was not commodities, but a set of modern retail methodologies. It allowed peers to see for the first time that stores could be organized in such a systematic way, which objectively calibrated the starting line for the entire industry. Most of the heavyweight retail enterprises that now stand out in the Chinese market debuted in exactly this period.

Entering this huge and unfamiliar new market, Walmart embraced some changes, such as expanding the proportion of fresh food and making store sizes more flexible.

But in more key areas, it also demonstrated rare concentration and flexibility at the same time.

The most typical example is pricing. China's retail industry has long relied on promotion-driven operations, setting inflated marked prices first, then offering discounts, full-price reductions and coupons, at the cost of employee energy consumption and consumer anxiety. Walmart brought in the concept of EDLP (Every Day Low Price), and it has adhered to this principle even during the e-commerce boom when promotional campaigns repeatedly sparked nationwide shopping sprees.

Its logic is to exchange long-term stable prices for customers' sense of security and trust, and reduce decision-making costs. This counter-mainstream approach proved to the industry that low prices do not have to rely on marketing tricks, and certainty itself can become a competitive advantage.

This flexible sense of rhythm is fully reflected in its infrastructure investments. When Walmart tested e-commerce in 2010, Taobao Mall had just been launched for two years, JD.com was still building its logistics network, and the domestic e-commerce industry was far from fully exploding. In 2014, when most retailers still relied on self-purchasing for their stores, Walmart built the country's first standardized fresh food distribution network. These two investments were barely noticed at the time, but laid the foundation for its subsequent e-commerce penetration rate of more than 50% and omni-channel matrix.

In the subsequent waves of digital transformation and instant retail, industry players gradually realized that the moat of retail is often not the visible shelves at the front end, but the unseen warehousing, distribution and cold chain system. But Walmart's experience shows that the outcome of competition is sometimes partially determined before the demand even explodes.

Looking back, every milestone of Walmart in China corresponds to an industry reform. Introducing modern retail to China, testing e-commerce, building a fresh food distribution network — it may not be the fastest every time, but it almost always makes its moves before the industry inflection point, acting as both a participant and in a sense an enlightener.

The turbulent current never stops. Today, when "being able to buy what you want" is no longer a problem, the focus of competition has shifted from "whether the product is available" to "whether the product is trustworthy" — a more difficult question has emerged in front of every player: who can truly win consumers' trust?

II. Retail Restructuring: Walmart Wins Again by Returning to Fundamentals

In recent years, keywords such as instant retail, hard discount, community supermarket, private brand and store optimization have appeared one after another. With each wave of trend, the industry is discussing: is the traditional supermarket business still viable?

A large number of players have dropped out amid anxiety. Those who withdrew seemed to have tried their best to do the "right" things at every trend, chasing new waves, but in the process of chasing, they gradually blurred their core user value and forgot to ask "what do my customers need".

Walmart is also under pressure in this ebbing tide, but its reaction is different from most of its peers. It did not rush to change direction, but returned to the original point of "customer first" and re-improved all its basic skills.

Xiaojing Zhu, President and CEO of Walmart China, once mentioned a detail: "When we inspect stores, our procurement colleagues will habitually introduce 'this is the Zone 01 I am responsible for, that is Zone 74', but customers will never understand the store in this way."

In her view, standing in the customer's shoes, or regarding yourself as an ordinary customer to examine a store, is of great significance. "We often unconsciously fall into the retailer's mindset, led by financial statements, product selection strategies, KPIs and processes. Sometimes we think we have done well enough, but in fact we may have deviated from the real expectations of customers." This is the epitome of Walmart's latest round of transformation direction.

When the "customer first" concept is implemented at the product level, Walmart's private brand "Fresh Value" has become the most prominent carrier.

Since 2025, Walmart has made comprehensive efforts to develop its private brand. The product scale of "Fresh Value" has grown rapidly from dozens of SKUs to nearly a thousand models. Its brand proposition is only four words: "Simplicity for Freshness". "Simplicity" means simplifying the ingredient list, and "Freshness" means that the raw materials, origin and user experience are all convincing.

Apart from the slogan, the key to the success of Fresh Value lies in a complete mechanism from customer feedback to product launch. The earliest viral "little green bottle" is a representative example. Walmart launched a 250ml small bottle version based on user feedback on the 1L product, with the price lowered at the same time. By transforming social platform content and user feedback into forward-looking product insights, a bottle of milk became a bestseller.

On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, this logic has been further deepened. In August 2026, Walmart launched the "Listening & Improving" themed product series, with six clear improvement directions: less sugar, less salt, optimized taste, optimized ingredient list, and small packaging for easier use.

At the specific product level, there are countless examples of "listening to customers' advice". The sugar content of Yangzhi Ganlu (mango sago dessert) has been reduced by 20%, responding to the demand of "wanting to eat dessert without too much sugar burden"; fresh-cut potato chips with cherry blossom pattern were added with a sealing design immediately after customers reported that "there is no sealing strip, which makes storage inconvenient".

Consumers' increasing sensitivity to ingredient lists is also driving product iteration. The ingredient list of the Angus crispy beef stick has been simplified to the extreme: 99% beef plus 1% edible salt, nothing else.

"Being willing to listen to customers' advice" is in itself a valuable quality, which means that retailers are willing to have the most direct contact with customers, listen to their feedback during product development, and truly have the consciousness of always meeting user needs.

After "listening to customers' advice", being able to deliver the improved products requires a complete mechanism from consumer feedback to supply chain response: social media and community comments are systematically collected and transformed into product demands; the procurement team takes these demands to suppliers, adjusting formulas and processes at every link; after the improved products are launched, the feedback loop restarts.

Jun Zhu, President of Walmart China Store Format, positions Fresh Value in this way: "What it aims to do is not just 'Walmart's private brand', but 'differentiated product strength that meets the needs of target customer groups'. The former starts from the channel, while the latter starts from the customer."

When "customer first" becomes the starting point for judging all business decisions, choices become clear. Instead of following the trend to create a false low-price feeling with complex promotions, it adheres to "Every Day Low Price"; instead of blindly imitating a certain reform template, it first understands what the target customer group it serves really needs; instead of developing private brands just for the sake of it, it targets the gaps that consumers truly need.

Amidst surging concepts, Walmart China has delivered a still leading performance report. In the 2026 fiscal year, Walmart China achieved net sales of 24.7 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 21.7%, and has achieved double-digit growth for three consecutive fiscal years. In the first quarter of the 2027 fiscal year, Walmart China achieved net sales of 8 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 22.3%, with both Walmart Supercenter and Sam's Club recording double-digit growth. On the list released by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, Walmart has ranked first in the Top 100 Supermarkets in China for 5 consecutive years.

III. 30 Years of Winning Trust

If Walmart's format self-reshaping is a story of temporary frustration, then regaining its footing and winning again, Sam's Club has told a different narrative over these 30 years — remaining dormant for a long time, but always focusing on the essence of retail and striving for excellent results.

Sam's Club is undoubtedly one of the most important growth engines for Walmart China in recent years, but a surprising set of figures shows that it took 22 years to get the first million memberships in the Chinese market, added one million new members in only 6 months in 2021, and had more than 10.7 million paid members by 2025.

Behind the steeply rising growth curve, Walmart did not lower its standards due to slow growth in these 22 years, nor did it change its positioning due to short-term performance pressure, but pushed all basic skills to the extreme. When the market was ready, the dividend of trust was released all at once.

The retail industry is an industry of high-frequency repeated games. If consumers think the value is good, they will come back tomorrow; if they think it is not worth it, they may never step into the store again. How to continuously build trust is an eternal proposition that all players have to face.

High quality, differentiation and member value are Sam's unique core logic, as well as its answer to the trust proposition.

The member value of Sam's is essentially a kind of "pre-positioned trust". Members pay 260 yuan or 680 yuan per year for the promise that "everything here is worth buying". Sam's has about 4,000 selected SKUs in its stores, and products with low sales performance, unqualified quality or low member recognition will be continuously removed. The selection process of each category is a process of giving up: giving up the sales growth brought by more SKUs, giving up the cost saved by lowering quality control standards, and giving up the impulse to relax supply chain audit when a certain category is selling well.

With more than 10 million paid members and a 92% renewal rate for premium members, all these results point to one conclusion: consumers are willing to pay for "certainty", and once this certainty is established, it will form extremely strong user stickiness.

"High quality" is reflected in quantifiable control. Taking imported chilled beef as an example, strict checks are implemented from the cattle breed, age, post-slaughter indicators to muscle color. The whole process of cold chain is traceable, and the temperature in the store processing area is controlled between 4℃ and 7℃, which is far stricter than the usual industry requirements.

Standing in front of the freezer, what consumers see is not a slogan of "selected good beef", but a traceable chain that can be followed up. This is exactly the key: when "high quality" changes from marketing rhetoric to a series of verifiable figures and processes, Sam's has its own unique "certainty".

"Differentiation" comes from in-depth co-creation with suppliers. The "differentiation" of most retailers stops at changing packaging and pasting private brand labels, but Sam's chooses to go upstream — from soil cultivation, seed breeding, formula development to process transformation, it writes the differentiation into every link of the industrial chain.

The uniqueness of a product is not determined at the last mile on the shelf, but defined when it is still a seedling or a formula. This approach is slow, heavy and hard to replicate, but the reward is a repurchase rate of more than 90% for private brands. Consumers are willing to buy the same product over and over again, which just shows that real differentiation is not the freshness created by marketing, but the exclusive value solidified by the supply chain.

In addition, practices including six-level audit, unannounced inspection, and third-party sampling inspection are reflected as costs on financial statements and cumbersome management processes, but they form the internal foundation of trust.

This is the consistent style of Walmart since its founding. Sam Walton, who passed away in 1992, never saw a store in China, but the principles he