Title: A critical analyses of Walmart's expansion into three Asian countries

Authors: Deepak Halan

Addresses: Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida, India

Abstract: The paper aspires to review Walmart's experiences in three South East Asian countries - i.e., Japan, China, and South Korea and analyse the reasons for not achieving success in them. This would help managers of retail firms understand the pitfalls in these countries in their internationalisation journey. The content analyses of the literature review yielded several insights related to factors behind Walmart's failure in these three countries. These were further categorised as normative, cognitive and regulative and also subcategorised further - basis an adapted institutional theory model. It was found that the normative related factors were about seven times the number of cognitive or regulative related factors that explained the failure. This paper reveals several aspects which other retailers need to keep in mind while planning and formulating strategies for globalisation and growth.

Keywords: Walmart Asia expansion; retail internationalisation; institutional theory model; globalisation strategy; retail failure; Walmart Japan; Walmart China; Walmart South Korea.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2021.117407

International Journal of Business and Globalisation, 2021 Vol.29 No.1, pp.99 - 115

Received: 18 Dec 2018
Accepted: 03 Mar 2019
Published online: 06 Sep 2021 *

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