BUSINESS CULTURE

REPORT ON CASE STUDY: Wal-Mart in Japan
Question 1: How would you characterize Wal-Mart’s approach to global management?
The trademark of Wal-Mart’s global management approach focuses on 3 main strategies: low price, best value, large selection of goods & high quality service.
Being the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart will enter the international market by providing a wide variety of products at a lower price than its domestic competitors. In addition, one of the common strategies of Wal-Mart is to partner or acquire a local supermarket retailer who has already had a good knowledge of the market in order to save time & money. Wal-Mart is also famous for its great use of distributor network. They pay a lot of
Wal-Mart believed Seiyu was the partner best suited for its entry strategy because by working through a local partner, Wal-Mart believed it could better wade through Japan’s long and costly network of suppliers, which has long frustrated many other foreign investor. Since only the biggest Japanese retailers have the leverage with manufactures, partnering with an existing market leader should prove invaluable when attempting to negotiate direct deals. Moreover, Wal-Mart avoids having to build stores and can take advantage of Seiyu’s well-recognized brand.
Question 4: Do you think Wal-Mart is doing enough cross-cultural training with its Seiyu employees? What are the greatest challenges Wal-Mart faces in relating to its Japanese employees?
In our opinion, in such a different market like Japan compare to the US’s, Wal-Mart is doing enough cross cultural training with its Seiyu employees, but will take time to make employees to adapt changes.
First, to reinforce the importance of selling correctly, Wal-Mart has put store managers through weeklong training sessions and has flown hundreds of Seiyu workers to company headquarter in Arkansas. This hopefully can be successful in training Wal-Mart Japan’s employees to learn global management and selling style which