Walmart, the multinational retail hypermarket, said that it has procured goods worth over $30 billion from the Indian market for its global operations in the last 25 years. The company aims to triple its sourcing of these goods from India to $10 billion annually by 2027.
Andrea Albright, Walmart’s executive vice president of sourcing, explained that through its Walmart Vriddhi initiative, introduced in 2019, the company is providing free training to Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to help them “acquire new skills, expand, and achieve their business goals.” During its Growth Summit, the company declared that they have surpassed their goal ahead of schedule and have already trained over 50,000 MSMEs.
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Jason Fremstad, Walmart’s senior vice president, supplier development and sourcing, said, “What we are aiming to do this week is to continue finding new suppliers to source in categories- home, apparels, foods, health and wellness, toys… this week is focused on expanding those opportunities and finding new suppliers that we can export in an effort to achieve the goal that we have set out for sourcing $10 billion by the end of 2027.”
The retailer, boasting 2.1 million associates worldwide, describes itself as a “people-led, tech-powered, omni-channel” entity, emphasizing its commitment to saving customers’ money and enhancing their quality of life. The summit aimed to facilitate collaboration between buyers and suppliers, with the goal of expediting exports nationwide.
“Our focus is to recruit and train new suppliers to fulfil our purchase orders around the world. These orders often lead to the creation of new jobs. It also allows our suppliers to invest back in their local communities,” Albright said.
Doug McMillion, CEO of Walmart in a joint video with Walmart international president and CEO, Kathryn McLay, said, “Other than the US, India is the only market where we have set a sourcing objective. And that is because we see so much opportunity.”
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Walmart also aimed to explore potential solutions for supply chain challenges by partnering with innovative companies and startups.
Albright said, “Some of the challenges could range from circularity- how do we continue to find ways to be more sustainable inside of our product. Other challenges might be- how we might use Gen-AI or AI to continue to forecast better and get better data to our suppliers. So, there’s a range of problems that I think the entire industry is trying to solve. And we’re trying to find those right entrepreneurs to learn more from and maybe can create some type of partnerships.”
