Walmart Inc. (WMT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. My name is Kate McShane. I'm the retail hardline, broadline analyst at Goldman Sachs. And we're very happy to have David Guggina, Executive Vice President and Chief E-commerce Officer of Walmart U.S. David serves as the Executive Vice President and Chief E-commerce Officer for Walmart U.S. and leads the company's work to grow its online business by delivering exceptional customer and seller experiences across all online platforms and services. Dave, thank you so much for joining us today.

Absolutely. Happy to be here with all of you.

We wondered if you can maybe just start out telling us a little bit about your current role and responsibilities at Walmart, but also what your prior experiences maybe have done to prepare you for what you've accomplished so far?

Absolutely. I am the Chief E-commerce Officer for Walmart U.S. Essentially, what that means is our team is responsible for the U.S. e-commerce strategy and execution. To talk a little bit about my background, I have spent most of my career in manufacturing and supply chain. And then at the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to lead our e-commerce business for the U.S. So my first big job, some of you may have drove Cobalt many years ago. I worked at General Motors when I went to school and helped build Cobalt in Lordstown, Ohio. And then I moved on to Anheuser-Busch and spent a few years working at the St. Louis brewery. I did logistics planning, and I also ran automated canning lines. And then I spent about a decade with Amazon. In the last 8 years I've spent with Walmart. So if you think about my experiences, again, mostly supply chain and manufacturing, but a lot of experience in fulfillment, distribution, first, mid and last mile. I've held roles that are both designed automation, the hardware as well as design the software that powers supply chains. So warehouse management systems, control systems as well as transportation management systems. And it has been an incredibly -- its been a blast stepping into this role, which is a more commerce-focused role. But having those experiences and really connecting the 2 worlds at a deeper level than I ever imagined in the past.

I can imagine you've seen quite a bit of change, too, from your days just focusing on the supply chain to today. If we just focus on the e-commerce business to start, it's about 20% of Walmart sales today. And over the past 5 years, as we just kind of talked about, there's been rapid change in development in the e-commerce offering. Can you maybe touch on some of the key milestones of Walmart's omni transformation to where you are today?

Absolutely. So we have incredible momentum in our e-commerce business. We just reported Q2 earnings, and we saw 26% growth in the Walmart U.S. e-com business. And that's a 2-year stack of roughly 48%. So you can see we've got acceleration. And I can spend a lot of time up here talking about all the things we've done over the years. But if I just had to call out a few, one that I would call out is our focus on online pickup and delivery that started in the grocery space, but it really expanded to everything inside of a supercenter, and that has really resonated with our customers. But we didn't stop there. We're continuing to develop ways to connect our supercenters, our neighborhood markets, all of our stores to our upstream supply chain in more dynamic ways over time that ultimately result in a better customer experience for our customers. I would also call out our focus on fast delivery. Customers love fast delivery, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that, but that has -- that has been something that's been a game changer for our business in recent times. And then we made a decision years ago to invest in the marketplace and build an open marketplace and specifically build out Walmart fulfillment services and that has helped us deepen our assortment offering that we are bringing to our customers. And customers want great prices, great value. They want a broad assortment. They want a fantastic experience, and they want to do business with a company that they trust. So those are the areas that I would call out.

Yes. So maybe if we can drill down on each of those areas that you mentioned speed and that's something I think if you were to look at Walmart's transcripts of their earnings calls the last couple of quarters, you just heard more and more. And so could you maybe talk to us about how your store footprint gives you a competitive advantage when it comes to that speed?

Absolutely. So obviously, Walmart is a retailer but we're also a forward deployed fulfillment network with 4,700 assets across the U.S., and that gives us incredible capability. You may have a supercenter nearby you that has 120,000 SKUs. You may have a supercenter nearby that has 200,000 SKUs. But those SKUs are curated for your geographic location. So it's millions of items when you look at it across the whole U.S. in these 4 deployed nodes, and that gives us great capabilities when it comes to speed. So today, we can deliver to 94% of U.S. households in 3 hours or less. By the end of the year, we're going to expand that to 95% of U.S. households, and we're just getting started. For our scheduled delivery, which is a large portion of our business, about 1/3 of them are fast, so fast as 3 hours or less and 25% of those fast deliveries are now delivered in 30 minutes or less. And it truly is a magical experience. I think examples bring things to life. So I'll share one that this network was able to enable for our customers. So recently, Nintendo launched their new Nintendo Switch 2, and we were lucky enough to get a bunch of that inventory and we made it available on our app. And it's sold out in minutes, but one of the key differentiators that we had was we promised to deliver those Nintendo 2 switches to customers by 9 a.m. on the day of launch, on the day of release, and you have to have thousands of forward deployed fulfillment nodes to be able to bring that to life. I'm happy to say that we did that. Most of them were delivered by 7:00 a.m. And we also appended a surprise and delight for our customers. We added some chips, and we added a soda to show folks that Walmart can obviously deliver electronics incredibly quickly to your doorstep, or in your home, but we also have a vast food offering. And what we found was a lot of the customers that order those Switch, many of them were first-time customers with Walmart, and they weren't as familiar with the speed capabilities that we have. And it was just a fantastic event, and it got a lot of positive press. But why I bring that example up is sub that item for any item that's scarce or in high demand. And maybe it resides deeper in our supply chain. We can forward deploy those items to thousands of nodes across the country. And serve customers in unique ways when it comes to speed enabled by the store network that you referenced, Kate.

So you mentioned new customers, which is great to hear. But we wondered a little bit about as customers discover the speed. Just what have you learned from their behaviors in terms of the optionality for fast delivery.

Yes. We've been learning quite a bit, particularly this year. We -- our fastest options at the beginning of the year were 90 minutes or 60 minutes. We've moved to dynamic promise, and we now promise in minutes. So if we can get an item to your doorstep in 23 minutes, we'll promise 23 minutes. But what we've learned is that when customers utilize fast delivery, their frequency starts to increase. They also reach in and their basket starts looking differently. They may start and most of the entry point is with fresh food, but they may start buying groceries from us. But over time, what we see is the use of fast delivery has them reaching into general merchandise, reaching into fashion, reaching into home goods. And we also have also seen larger baskets with fast delivery, about 13% larger than normal scheduled or non-fast delivery. So it's resonating with our customers, customers who use fast delivery spend 2x more than the average digital customer. Customers who've created a habit or utilize fast delivery 4 or more times spend 3x more than our average digital customer, which is absolutely fantastic to see, and we're going to continue to lean into this space.

Okay. So we talked about speed. Now maybe we can talk about assortment. You continue to broaden your assortment with marketplace, but you've also seen success in bringing new brands into your 1P assortment. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about that strategy? And then as a differentiator, you mentioned people start out with grocery or fresh. How is that a differentiator in your overall e-commerce offering?

Yes. So we have software systems that look at the ecosystem of retail globally, and they identify what we call in-demand items. We want to have those in-demand items in our network, in our marketplace and 1P work together to do that. For example, we had a brand, Arctic. Some of you may be familiar with it. They make coolers, but we had a brand Arctic that started as a marketplace seller became a WFS seller. We deployed it in more and more fulfillment centers and it performed incredibly well. And we ended up deploying Arctic in thousands of stores. And today, you'll find them in thousands of stores. And now they're a 1P partner. So many of our marketplace partners are not just third-party partners, but they're also 1P. Let's hypothetically say you have 100,000 SKUs and you are in the Walmart marketplace. You may have a few hundred in a few thousand stores. You may have 10,000 that reside in fulfillment centers. And then you may have the other 90,000 that reside in our marketplace, maybe they're seller fulfilled. So we want to expose all of the great brands and great items to our customers. And sometimes, it's hard to know exactly what item is going to be the most popular. But when we identify an item that's incredibly popular, we can move it through our supply chain from being may be available in 2 days to being available in 28 minutes. What was the second part of your question?

Just how grocery and fresh food is a differentiator?

I think it's an incredible differentiator in our marketplace. So if you think of inventory as head, torso and tail. Head inventory moves the fastest, then you've got torso items that move slightly slower. And then you have a long tail of items that people purchase less frequently. Grocery is the fastest-moving items. And we are the largest grocer in the U.S. And what that means is that the frequency with which customers are coming to our platform is significant. And as they learn more about us and our capabilities, I noted fast delivery, they're reaching deeper into the torso entail. So grocery is a differentiator when it comes to our marketplace. Absolutely.

Is there a benefit that customers would see from choosing to shop Walmart's 3P selection other than the grocery piece?

Absolutely. So let me, I think examples bring things to life. So we sell tires on our marketplace. We sell over 100,000 tires. And the tire industry in the U.S. is a disaggregated supply chain. So there's over 2,000 distribution hubs in the U.S. that provide tires to the places where many of us get our tires replaced. We have 4,700 nodes, over 2,500 of those nodes have our supercenters that have auto care centers. We've connected the two. We now can take marketplace tires and have them delivered to a store and installed into a customer's vehicle. So in store, we've got hundreds of options for you to install tires on your vehicle. But if we don't have the tires that you're looking for, we have access to tens of thousands and over 100,000 as you reach further across the network. And we can -- you can schedule a tire installation of a supercenter, a marketplace seller can move those tires to that your local supercenter. We can install them. And while your tires are getting installed, maybe you like fishing, you can get some new lures or maybe you need to complete your weekly grocery shopping, and you can do that as well. But that's a way that our marketplace differentiates with our capabilities. Those disaggregated 4,700 fulfillment nodes.

This might be getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but how does the customer know that you have all this capability?

Yes. So one, we have campaigns that we've announced because I agree, we have a who new campaign that some of you may have seen this year. Because we want more and more customers to learn that we have these capabilities. And there are customers that don't necessarily know that. But other ways that are maybe not marketing facing, if you were to go to Cypress, Texas, and walk through our new supercenter in Cypress Texas. What you would see is you would see the assortment come to life. It's absolutely beautiful. Recently, you would have seen back-to-school come into life in that store. But you also would see the torso and tail assortment coming to life. You would have seen a washer and dryer on display that are a marketplace seller washer and dryer. You have been able to scan a QR code, order that washer and dryer, have it delivered to your home and installed in your home all through the Walmart app. We're doing the same thing in other stores where there's VIZIO displays. You can scan the display. You can find out that, that 65-inch TV, that 50-inch TV can be delivered to your home, maybe you want 3 of them. They can all be delivered to your home. We'll install them along with the sound bars. And if you're a gamer, we can bring the Nintendo Switch or the Xbox along with it. So it's changing that in-store experience as well. We want our in-store shoppers to become digital shoppers because it's truly that omni shopper that's the most valuable to us. So go from in-store, download the app, utilize grocery, utilize fast delivery, start shopping in the broader assortment. It's a flywheel that's really healthy for us.

And then maybe we can talk a little bit about the sellers. Just how does Walmart go about building relationships with brands and distributors? And can you describe the process by which you vet the sellers?

Absolutely. So recently, I was at our seller summit. I mean over 2,000 sellers in San Diego just a couple of weeks ago. It was a fantastic event. We have both merchandising and marketplace teams that engage with sellers. And we call that outbound contacts. So there may be a brand or a seller that we'd like to go get. And we have brands that we are actively working with today to either get the brand or go deeper into their assortment. But more often, we get more volume on the inbound side. So we also invest in software tools that make it easier for sellers to onboard onto our network and understand our capabilities, right? We will help you sell on walmart.com, but will also help you sell on your website and just be a fulfillment mechanism for you in addition to allowing you to sell on Walmart. So that is one way that we bring more brands and more items into our ecosystem. And you asked about vetting sellers. I think of this as -- it's a three-pronged stool. There's seller ingress, and we are building more and more capable tools, particularly with the onset of artificial intelligence and the ability to ingest multimodal content and assess that content. We're building incredible tools to -- for seller ingress. That's one stool leg, another stool leg is item ingress. So we have to make sure that the items that the seller is making available on our platform are items that we want on our platform. And then the third leg of the stool is seller and item life cycle. So once you've come on board and we've vetted you and we've vetted the items that you're bringing on to the marketplace, we have to constantly vet over time to ensure that those items and that seller are driving trust on our platform. I mentioned customers want great prices. They want a broad assortment of brands and items. They want a fantastic experience. But ultimately, they want to do business with a company that they trust. And there are times that these systems and tools that we've built discover that there are items or sellers that aren't driving trust on the platform, and we have to remove them from the platform. But that's the way the mental model we used to think about it.

Is there an ideal number of sellers that you hope to reach?

We are constantly looking at what we define as in-demand assortment and we want to bring in demand assortment into our ecosystem. So I think that's an ever-changing number. Over the last 12 months, we've increased the number of sellers on our platform by 50%, which is fantastic to see. So what I would say is right now, we have a growing marketplace, and we're adding more sellers and more items, but we're not talking about a particular number. We're going to follow the customers where they lead us with regards to what they'd like to see on the marketplace.

Walmart continues to invest in fulfillment capabilities with Walmart Fulfillment Services or WFS with penetration for sellers up almost 600 basis points last year. Can you maybe walk us through the build-out of the fulfillment business specifically and how it's contributing to growth at Walmart today?

Yes. Our fulfillment ecosystem is vast. We've talked about the stores and how they play a role. We have import distribution centers. We have regional distribution centers. We have perishable distribution centers. We have inbound consolidation centers. We've got fulfillment centers. We're deploying automated technology and modernized software across the network. So we're making substantial investments in our fulfillment ecosystem, and it truly is a global supply chain. But what I would say, I'm really excited about is WFS, Walmart Fulfillment Service is making that ecosystem I just described available to our sellers. We find that 70% of our top sellers are within WFS. And when a seller becomes a WFS seller and they give us enough inventory that we can make it available in 2 days or next day, same day, we see their sales lift by 50%. So we're incredibly bullish about Walmart Fulfillment Services and giving sellers access to this incredible supply chain ecosystem that we continue to invest in.

Maybe we can move on to Media and Data ventures. Could you maybe talk about the interplay between the growth of e-commerce and the success of some of your higher-margin businesses like advertising and data ventures?

Absolutely. So there is a symbionic relationship between ads, data ventures, VIZIO as well as Walmart+ memberships and e-commerce. As e-commerce grows, we have greater opportunity to grow our ads business to grow the data ventures business, to grow our Walmart+ business. And then those are incredibly profitable businesses and are reshaping our P&L. We can take those dollars and we can do what we do best, better than anybody and reinvest into experience and reinvest into price. And what that drives is a larger e-commerce business. So it is a symbiotic relationship between the two, and we're incredibly bullish about e-commerce and therefore, we're incredibly bullish about advertising. We're incredibly bullish about data ventures, about what VIZIO will bring to life within the e-commerce ecosystem.

And then just as a continuing thought of that, that all works together to improve profitability as well.

Absolutely Absolutely.

Maybe if we can move on to AI, and this probably could take up the last remaining 12 minutes just because it seems like there's so much going on both customer-facing and noncustomer facing. But what is Walmart doing specifically to improve the customers' digital experience with Sparky and/or just the lower cost to serve?

Yes. Maybe I'll give a few examples of ways that we're utilizing artificial intelligence within e-comm, and then I'll wrap it up with some more details on Sparky. So as you can imagine, in e-commerce. We are constantly experimenting. We're testing new user experiences on the app. We're testing new user experiences in terms of the services and the goods that we offer to our customers. And we have teams of data scientists that conduct these experiments. And more recently, we've developed an agent that I'm really excited about that essentially, we conduct experiments. We give an experiment and ID. And then we put all the data related to that experiment ID into the cloud. And more recently, we've ingested that data into large language models that are internal to our organization. And what that's been able to do is we prompt the agent with, here's the experiment ID, here is the hypothesis we had, here's the way I'd like you to structure the data and report back to me. And what we found is that we can gain insight, what took a data scientist, days or weeks before can now be done in minutes. We can gain insight that drives action that drives outcomes that matter to the business at a pace that was not available to us before the onset of these tools. So it's a really fun time to be a data scientist at Walmart. So if you want to join the e-com team, let me know. I would also give another example. I talked about deepening and broadening our assortment. Many of you have likely heard the term ambient agent. So these are agents that are always on, always working. We've developed ambient agents that are looking at that in-demand assortment that's available in the ecosystem. And then they are determining, "Hey, what is in demand, how much of it do we need to purchase, purchasing it. And then where do we need to deploy that inventory to make it available at a particular customer value proposition, whether that's 2 day, next day, same day. So these agents are live today, acting on our behalf with humans in the loop, but it's incredible to see the capability that we have there. And then you mentioned Sparky. So we've got a few super agents. So we'll have agents that kind of report into the super agents. And one of our super agents is our commerce agent that we've named Sparky. And today, Sparky is really a shopping assistant. If you're visiting Northwest Arkansas and you want to know where a great place to fish is and what equipment you could get delivered to your home from Walmart to then go on that fishing trip. Sparky can help you with that. But in the very near future, Sparky is going to be able to help with execution. So the mental model that we've been using is Sparky's foundation is data. And that's Walmart ecosystem data like our catalog or our service level capabilities or the inventory we own in what quantity, where it is? All in near real time. There's Walmart data. But then there's also customer data. The first time you engage with Sparky, we'll know a few things about you versus the 100th time you engage with Sparky. You will know a lot more about your shopping preferences, just like a relationship with a friend. So that's another subset of data, the customer data. And then the third is the vast amount of human knowledge that is available on the web that has been synthesized by these large language models. So with that data foundation, we can assess intent of a customer. Are they on a replenishment mission? Are they trying to discover something new? We can then help them discover items and execute, purchase those items, get them to deliver it to their homes at the right time on the right date or very quickly. And then there's a post-purchase experience. You bought furniture, you get it, you realize, you know what, I don't really want to set this furniture up. Sparky will let you know, be able to let you know in the future that we can set that furniture up for you. We have that service or maybe you bought a dress, and you don't think it's the right color after getting it. Sparky will be able to help you with that return. And then all of those activities, whether it's intent, understanding intent, discovery and execution or post-purchase experience will then feed that foundational data model and that will help Sparky over time, serve customers better.

One area that you led the strategic implementation of was the automation technology and Walmart supply chain facilities. Can you maybe talk through what inning we are in, in the automation process today?

Absolutely. I coach my daughter softball. I don't play baseball, but I'm pretty sure baseball has 9 innings. So if you had 9 innings, I would say we've just completed the third inning. So we're still early with regards to our automation journey. In the fulfillment network, which is where we're furthest along, we've got about half of our inventory that flows from fulfillment centers to customers moving through automated systems. In our ambient distribution network, about half of the regional distribution centers are in some phase of the automation deployment and depending on the site, either a 2-phased or a 3-phased program. And then in the perishable space, we've launched 3 brand-new perishable distribution centers that are performing fantastically, but we're earliest in that program. So just rounded the third inning, we are seeing fantastic results. We're really happy with the automation program. But we're really excited about what it's going to deliver in the future. In terms of reshaping customer experience and improving the bottom line.

How is automation impacting the P&L today? Do we have to wait until the ninth inning before we start to see more of a needle-moving event there?

As I noted, we're seeing great results in our fulfillment centers. They're our most productive fulfillment capability by far. It's also, as I noted, the reshaping the customer experience. So these new fulfillment centers, they can hold millions of SKUs because they have millions of cubic feet of space. They're about twice as productive as a legacy fulfillment center. And they're becoming more and more capable over time as we continue to bring more and more robotics into the different processes. So when we launched them originally, we had a 5-step process, but we've found innovative ways to even automate different percentages of each of those different processes and parts.

Okay. And in the last few minutes that we have, could you maybe summarize what excites you the most about your e-commerce business over the next couple of years?

Yes. The things I'm most excited about are the continued focus on fast delivery. As I think about our different channels, I break them up into -- there's shopping off of a shelf. There's picking goods up from your local supercenter. There's having items delivered in less than an hour. There's having items delivered sub same day, 1 hour to 6 hours, same day, 6 hours to 12 hours next day and 2 day. What I'm excited about is we are going to make more and more items faster for our customers. So 3 day will turn into a 2-day, 2-day into next day, next day in the same day, same day in the sub same day and more and more items will be offered ultrafast speeds in minutes. So that's incredibly exciting. And then the second one I'd call out is the marketplace. We are just getting started. We have a big marketplace. It's growing quickly, but there is so much opportunity to sink our teeth into that space and continue to expand assortment for our customers. And lastly, I'm excited about Agentic Commerce. We mentioned we talked about a few of the capabilities, but we're leaning into artificial intelligence it's making our business more efficient, and it's going to reshape the way that our customers shop with us in the future.

That's great. With that, we will end the conversation. Thank you for joining us today.

Thanks, Kate.