In the 1990s, Walmart seemed on pace to become a global giant. After rapid growth in the U.S. domestic market throughout the 1980s, the company opened its first international store in Mexico City in 1991, followed by Canada in 1994. By 1998, it had expanded to Germany and South Korea, betting that its “always the low price” approach to business would be enough to outcompete foreign vendors.
But less than a decade later, by 2006, it was forced to scale back its international ambitions. In just a three-month window that year, the company retreated from both Germany and South Korea, having lost more than $2 billion in those ventures.
What went wrong? And what can we learn from these failures?
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