Retail chain store Wumart says "goodbye" to Wal-Mart
05 Jul '05
6 min read
Wenzhong insists that any similarity between Wumart's name and that of a far larger US store group is pure coincidence. He explains: "Wumart's parent company is called Wumei Holdings, and Wu Mei means good or high quality in Chinese."
Originally, the stores were called Wu Mei as well. However, Wenzhong found that English-speaking people tended to mis-pronounce the word as "woman".
"So I decided to change the name," he says. "I kept the first Wu of Wu Mei but changed the Mei to mart. You know, mart is a very common word," he says.
Wenzhong explains that it is only English speakers who notice the similarities between Wumart and Wal-Mart because when written in Chinese the words look totally different. "Not many Chinese consumers really know our English name," he says.
Although Wenzhong distances himself from Wal-Mart connections, he admits that Western retailers did influence him, if only subliminally.
"When I was a scholar at Stanford, I didn't imagine that I'd become a retailer, so although I shopped I didn't spend much time studying it," he says.
"However, when I decided that retail was a good business for me I learnt a lot of things from US and European retailers. They have 30 or 40 years more experience," he says.
Wenzhong says that although retail competition is intensifying in China, it is not rival operators who pose the greatest threat.
"For us, our major enemy is not any other competitors, it is ourselves. Whether or not we can continue to follow the right strategy, whether or not we can execute what we want to do, whether or not we can always do the right thing," he says.
marketing@alchempro.com
