Smarter Pricing: How to capture more value in your market

Look at the Wal-Mart way and look out!

Let us look at Wal-Mart – the victor in the US toy market and the world leader in opening price chasms for its rivals. A ruthless policy of ‘Always low prices. Always’ has brought annual sales topping $285 billion in the year to 31 January 2005, representing 11.2 percent growth over the previous year. By 1999, Bentonville-based Wal-Mart had became the world’s largest private employer with 1,140,000 associates in ten countries. On the day after Thanksgiving, in November 2002, Wal-Mart sales hit $1.43 billion in one single day. Finally, for a measure of its scale, with annual purchases of $15 billion, Wal-Mart accounted for almost 11 percent of the value of exports from the People’s Republic of China in 2003. ...