Organizational change memo regarding e-commerce from Eduardo Castro-Wright
To: US Officers, All International Officer Equivalents, All Walmart.com Associates and All Walmart US Home Office Associates
From: Eduardo Castro-Wright, Vice Chairman
Date: Jan. 28, 2010
RE: Global E-Commerce Changes
Online shopping has continued to significantly outpace the growth of traditional retail channels around the world. As you know, in the US we have a strong and growing e-commerce business. In this past year, we expanded that business even further by leveraging our large store base through our site-to-store initiative. The ability to allow our customer to take advantage of Walmart’s price leadership whenever and wherever she wants is what underpins our multi-channel strategy.
Now that we have a well-defined blueprint to continue to grow our online business, it’s time to leverage our size and global footprint to take advantage of this evolving customer trend. To accelerate the execution of these plans, we are announcing today several changes in how we pursue this business opportunity both here in the US as well as globally. In order to fully evolve into a multi-channel retailer here in the US, we need to make our organization, particularly in Merchandising and Marketing, channel agnostic.
Earlier today you heard that after a very successful tenure as President and CEO of Walmart.com, Raul Vazquez has been promoted to Executive Vice President and President of our newly-created Walmart West Business Division. His role as CEO of Walmart.com US will not be replaced. Instead, we will integrate our merchandising and operations capabilities of the dotcom organization with those of our traditional retail business. To lead this effort, Steve Nave has been promoted to Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Walmart.com US Business Unit, reporting to John Fleming. As you know, John led the Walmart.com business from its beginning and has great appreciation and understanding of what it takes to leverage the wonderful innovation and creativity of the Brisbane organization to help create this new multi-channel vision.
Additionally, to ensure the integration and coordination of our marketing activities and to take advantage of the increased importance of online as a media channel, we will now align the marketing function in Brisbane under the leadership of Stephen Quinn, Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart US.
To leverage our scale and drive efficiencies as we pursue new e-commerce opportunities around the globe, we are creating a new unit that will be responsible for driving online growth around the world – both in developed markets where we currently have stores and an online presence and in markets where we don’t. This new organization will be called Global.com.
To lead this new global initiative and to ensure we reach our ambitious expectations relative to growth and speed, we are announcing today the promotion of Wan Ling Martello, formerly the Chief Financial Officer of Walmart International, to Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Global.com. In her new role, Wan Ling’s primary responsibilities will include: (1) development and execution of a global strategy for e-commerce; (2) establishing cross-functional and cross-border Walmart relationships designed to accelerate and broaden our growth in the global online channel; and (3) the creation of technology platforms and applications that can be used effectively in every Walmart market. Consistent with that objective, Wan Ling will have a dotted line reporting relationship with the dotcom business unit leaders in every existing Walmart market. In order to carry out the third responsibility mentioned above, the following Walmart.com teams will become part of Global.com and will report to Wan Ling: Product Management, Application Development, Platform Engineering and Strategy.
Please join me in congratulating Wan Ling, Raul and Steve on their new roles and wish them well as we all pursue the exciting opportunities ahead of us.
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