Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 6 of 11

John David Rainey: You didn’t frame the question, Simeon, in terms of return on investment. But I want to take an opportunity to talk about that. When we get to the end of this year and you look at our ROI on a trailing 12-month basis, we’re going to see fairly material uptick if you look at our guidance, what’s implied there. And that’s more than what we expected at the beginning of the year. We actually anticipated that some of the improvements in ROI would be – would come next year and some of the years thereafter. We are actually pulling forward some of those benefits that we expected next year. And so we’re going to see some of that this year.

Operator: Our next question is from the line of Kelly Bania with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Kelly Bania: Good morning, thanks for taking our questions and congrats on your retirement as well, Judith. Wanted to just ask about e-commerce growth, 24%, I think, implies some pretty big market share gains but led by pickup and delivery. And I was curious if you could also just give us a sense of how Marketplace and 3P is ramping relative to your expectations and how, if at all, that’s impacting the general merchandise comp. And related to that, I guess, as you think of long term about the profitability of advertising, is there a similar opportunity on the food and consumables side? Or is it better to have discretionary and 3P a greater mix of e-commerce as it relates to growing advertising profitability?

Doug McMillon: Hi, Kelly, thanks for the question. One, really happy with the performance. And the team deserves credit for a lot of improvements that enabled the 24% growth. When we talk about pickup and delivery specifically, I think I would take a step back and just remind everyone what we talked about at our investor conference and what we’re ultimately trying to do with supply chain in the entire e-commerce business, is densify our inventory at the first mile, make the middle mile as efficient as possible and then shorten the last mile. And our store locations, over 4,700 locations in addition to the fulfillment centers, enable us to do that. So what’s happened over the last year or so is more of our e-commerce business and deliveries have come from stores because that’s where the inventory is closest to the customer and helps us with efficiency.

So it’s important to frame that, that is a part of the total. The way we measure this internally as we look at the number of transactions and customers and what they bought in the store, what they picked up and what was delivered. The second part of your question, really pleased with the progress in Marketplace. Our Plus event was a good marker for us in terms of what’s possible. With the Marketplace, a majority of our revenue from that event was driven by Marketplace sellers. And I’m thankful to the sellers who participated and helped us find customers or helped our customers find value at a time when they’re looking for value. And that was across all categories, including general merchandise. In fact, much of the event was general merchandise.

So I think the team has positioned the Marketplace well. And in terms of the second part of your question with advertising, there are opportunities for sellers. There are opportunities for suppliers. We’ll continue to learn, grow and experiment in stores and on the site. We want to ensure that Walmart Connect, the name Walmart Connect, connects our buyers, suppliers and sellers all to our customers in a way that’s accretive to the customer experience. We want to make sure that customers are finding what they want when they want it. And if this business can help people connect together, that’s great. And we saw that happen in the quarter. And the growth was higher than our e-commerce growth.

Page 6 of 11