Walmart posted its holiday-quarter sales and it was unexpectedly high. In fact, it was said to be the company's strongest earnings in a decade and experts say that the surge was mainly due to grocery and online sales. It was added that the company is not showing any signs of weakness in the U.S.'s consumer industry despite the recent slowdown that even forced some firms to close down.
According to Forbes, Walmart shares rose to 3.6 percent as per the report on Tuesday, Feb. 19. The number was better-than-expected considering the fact that the retailing market has shown a significant decline in the past months.
E-Commerce helped Walmart a lot. Based on the record, the company gained more profit as the online sales alone jumped by a whopping 43 percent.
"The mix of new customers in the online grocery is positive and encouraging," Walmart's CEO Doug McMillon said via phone interview. "Those who shop both in-store and online spend twice as much in total and spend more in stores."
Retail Touch Points also mentioned that Walmart's online grocery service has been boosting the growth of the retail company. The report stated that at present, it has seven grocery delivery partners due to the increasing demand of the customers.
Before 2019 ends, the store is aiming to double the number of this delivery service to accommodate the requirement of at least 1,600 stores nationwide. The current partners are DoorDash, Postmates, Point Pickup, Skipcart, AxleHire, Roadie, and Spark.
"We're making progress in e-Commerce," McMillon said. "Our focus remains on earning repeat visits and strengthening our assortment of merchandise."
Walmart's unexpected strong holiday sales also revealed the buying habits of the American consumers and the state of the retailing industry. It can now be verified that the spending remained vigorous because of the cheaper gasoline and robust labor market.
"We still feel pretty good about the consumer. We haven't seen much of a change," Brett Biggs, Walmart's chief financial officer told Reuters. "The data we are seeing still looks pretty healthy. Gas prices are down year over year, which helps."
Then again, the overall sales for the holiday shopping season in 2018 were generally good as it rose too high numbers that were not seen in the last six years. Based on the report by Mastercard, it was relayed that the increase was due to the consumers' buying as they were encouraged to shop to avail the early discounts.
