Retail chain store Wumart says "goodbye" to Wal-Mart
05 Jul '05
6 min read
Beijing based a non-state-owned retail chain store Wumart Group is leaving Wal-Mart for dust in China, reports James Hall.
The name is familiar and a stranger in China might do a double take. But Wumart of Beijing is proudly independent of the world's largest supermarket group, Wal-Mart of Bentonville, Arkansas.
In just over 10 years, Wumart has become the leading retailer in Beijing with 453 stores. It has seen sales growth that would make Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's chief executive, choke on his cheeseburger, and it has ambitious plans to double in size within five years.
China is one of the hottest turfs in retail. International players from Tesco to Carre-four to Wal-Mart and Auchan have piled into the country, desperate to woo its 1.3bn consumers and win a share of an under-developed store sector.
But Wumart, which floated on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2003 and saw sales rise by 47 per cent over the three months to March 2005, is showing foreign operators how it is done.
So who's behind it and where did it come from?
Wumart's roots can, in fact, be traced back to America but not for the seemingly obvious reason of its monicker. Indeed, the story of Wumart's gestation is intriguing.
It all stems from research into computer software systems that was being done in the early 1990s at Stanford University by Dr Zhang Wenzhong, the chain's founder. He developed an IT system for retailers, but returned to China to find that no one was interested in his invention.
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