Scope of International Operations
International operations for Bally's Total Fitness and Wal-Mart are responsible for a significant amount of growth as well as profitability. Bally's is the largest, and only nationwide, commercial operator of fitness centers, with approximately four million members and nearly 430 facilities located in 29 states, Canada, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean. As of June 30, 2005, Bally's opened fitness centers in over 45 major metropolitan areas representing 63 percent of the United States population and over 16 percent of the Canadian population. The Company introduced its first international Bally's facility in Nassau, Bahamas through a franchise agreement with Doctor's Hospital, the leading for-profit
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The company operates various retail formats in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. It operates 261 Canadian Wal-Mart stores and Sam's Clubs, 11 units in Argentina, 150 units in Brazil, 88 units in Germany, 16 units in South Korea, 697 units in Mexico, 54 units in Puerto Rico, and 292 units in the United Kingdom, as well as 48 units in China under joint venture agreements. As you can see, Wal-Mart is a much larger company than Bally Total Fitness. Wal-Mart's stores in Mexico alone exceed Bally Total Fitness' total amount of facilities in both the U.S. and overseas. Their growth strategy is much more rapid than that of Bally's. This is because Wal-Mart stores are built in a warehouse format and are much easier and quicker to have up and running, making money much faster. They also sell tons of commodities, which attract business no matter what. If the economy is very poor, people may think twice about that membership to Bally's but will still go and buy groceries and toilet paper. Though Wal-Mart has locations in several countries, it still has plenty of places that need to be occupied. Despite its successes so far, further expansion overseas will be a challenge for Wal-Mart. This is because the early success of the company has been concentrated in only a few countries where it was able to make profitable purchases. Expanding on those successes
The location of the first Wal-Mart in the Fortune Global 500 for the year of 2001 to 2002 turnover of 219.81 billion dollars. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the retail in the world. The company was much larger than its competitors in the United States - Sears Roebuck, Kmart, JC Penney and Nordstrom combined. In 2002, Wal-Mart operates more than 3,500 discount stores, Supercenters and Sam's Clubs in United States and over 1,170 stores in major countries around the world. The company also sells products online via the website, www.walmart.com. Wal-Mart is one of the largest private employers in the world, with the use of force about 1.28 million. The
Walmart faced strong entrenched competition in Canada and Europe. In these developed countries, they couldn’t gain critical mass through internal growth, so they had to acquire companies that have been in the market already. They acquired Woolco, a money losing operation, applied many of the American business practices, and within a few years, the Canadian operations were successful. They have 317 stores, and they account for more than 35 percent of the Canadian discount and department store market. In Europe, Walmart entered Germany by acquiring the Wertkauf hypermarket chain in 1998 and entered the UK by acquiring the 229-store ASDA group. They the leader and are now losing ground to Tesco. A major problem for Walmart in the European market is overexpansion. Accompanied with the famous “Always low prices” approach, they met large resistance from the competition and regulators. Large price wars began because Walmart was accused of underselling the competition. They struggled to build a strong competitive base in German losing more than $1 billion. They were unable to create a competitive advantage, so they sold their operations to a competitor, Metro. They also faced problems in Korea, so
An Analysis of the U.S. Health Club Industry in 2004 and the Role of Bally Total Fitness
Wal-Mart has preferred to expand internationally by buying existing operations and converting them to Wal-Mart stores. The company entered Canada by purchasing the Woolco chain that was competing with Kmart in that market, and it entered Mexico in much the same way. The company entered Europe by purchasing the Asda stores in the United Kingdom and an operation in Germany that later failed. Wal-Mart entered foreign markets via acquisition for a couple of reasons. The first is that the company relies on real estate as the cornerstone of its business. The second is that as a cost leader, Wal-Mart needed to build up economies of scale that would allow it to enjoy strong bargaining power in these markets immediately. Moreover, moving rapidly into a market minimizing the ability of competitors to register an adequate response.
This paper will answer the question of what it means to be a trans/multinational corporation in the 21st century. Walmart is the corporation that will be the focus of this paper. Through examining case studies and expert business analyses of Walmart, this paper will identify what the company sells, where the facilities located, and refer to aspects of capital, labor, and markets of it is final product. Also, this paper will examine the social costs or externalities produced by a multinational corporation such as Walmart. Walmart was chosen for this essay because it is one of the largest trans/multinational corporations in the world. There have been many business analyses conducted on Walmart that focus on its factors of production and this paper will compile information from these analyses.
Bally Total Fitness is a public firm in the U.S. health club industry. Since 1962, the company had developed into a large and nationwide commercial operator of fitness centers in the Unite States. But with the increasingly fierce market competition and the internal management problems such as poor accounting standards, the stock price of the company collapsed. Some shareholders had lost faith in the company. A major shareholder of the company was urging the CEO to sell the company. So the company faced two alternatives, one alternative was to sell the company to meet the demand of shareholders; the other alternative was to strengthen its internal control system to remedy the management fault. In this way to restore the
Outside the U.S. Costco has stores in Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Costco’s main international market is Canada. In fiscal 2015, for example, Costco’s Canadian store was more profitable than all its other international stores combined. If its market in Canada ever failed, then this could devastate this company (Soni Part 6). Costco needs to diversify its international markets to avoid such vulnerability. Meanwhile, Kroger does not have any stores outside the U.S. (Soni Part 20 COST), and Walmart has stores in 26 other countries (Soni Part 3).
Wal-Mart has expanded beyond the United States, they have gone global. Wal-Mart continues to offer food and goods at a low price and continue to thrive by using the mission statement that the retail giant was built upon which is great customer service and low prices.
In business, three major strategies comprising of cost leadership, differentiation, and focus strategies exist. The focus strategy emphasizes on providing services and products to a specified buyer group or market segment within a given geographic market. The differentiation approach is often defined as provision of services or products that are perceived to be unique in the market place. Wal-Mart emphasizes on the long-term strategy of cost leadership. Through this strategy, the company ensures that it offers customers with quality products at relatively lower prices than other providers in the industry. Through overall cost leadership strategy, Wal-Mart has been offering better quality products at a lower price than any competitor can offer. For the organization to achieve this goal, it has developed long-term supply chain management, which ensures that products are made available to the market at the required time (Enz, 2010).
In order to understand the success and failure of Walmart Stores, Inc. in markets other than the United States, we
Why do you think Wal-Mart did not venture abroad until 1991, despite its success in the USA?
Ans:Wal-Mart,Inc runs a chain of large, discount department stores.it is the world’s largest public corporation by revenue. Walmart is the largest private employer and the largest grocery retailer in the United States. Walmart is one of the best known industries all over the world. Its concentration of a single business strategy is the basis of its success over the decades by this strategy without having to rely upon diversification to sustain its growth and competitive advantage. The leading marketing strategies of Wal-Mart are low prices, service and smile. However by adapting this strategy, it has risked itself by putting all of a company’s egg in one industry basket. While its global strategy worked elsewhere, the results were bad in Germany and Korea that Wal-Mart withdrew from those countries.
Walmart is a multinational retail company that runs a network of more than 11,000 discount retail stores as well as warehouse stores distributed in more than 27 countries. Its headquarters are located in Bentonville, United. It ranks as the world’s leading private employer with over 2.2 million employees serving in different countries’ retail stores. Walmart operates as a family owned organization that is managed by the Walton family. The Walton siblings own more than 50% of this company through managing the Walton Enterprises as well as through individual holdings (Charles, 2014).
WalMart's approach to global expansion exemplifies the journey of self-discovery many corporations who have a stable, profitable domestic base of operations go through as they attempt to enter new markets globally. For WalMart this meant confronting the exceptionally high level of ethnocentrism in their organization while also using their analytics-based prowess to better understand cultures, not just costs and profits (Ming-Ling, Donegan, Ganon, Kan, 2011). The intent of this analysis is to define how WalMart overcame a significant series of challenges and successfully launched into China, overcoming an ethnocentric mindset and tendency to rely too much on analytics alone in guiding global expansion.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. was founded by Sam Walton in 1962. The first Walmart store was opened in Rogers, Arkansas, United States (Walmart, 2013). In addition, Wal-Mart is the world's second largest food retailers. After the year 1991, Wal-Mart becomes an international company, it expanded its business in 26 countries outside the United States (Walmart, 2013). Currently, Wal-Mart has over 800,000 affiliates and more than 6,000 international stores (Walmart, 2013). Wal-Mart operates in Japan called SEIYU. SEIYU was founded in 1963 and it is the largest supermarket chain in Japan (Walmart, 2013). Since 2002, Wal-Mart continues to acquire the shares of SEIYU, make it to become wholly-owned subsidiary of