COVER STORY: Walmart’s Passage to India

Even though Walmart is a late entrant into India, it has prised open an opportunity that nobody really applied their minds to. Instead of catering to the large Indian middle class like all other retailers, it is attempting a pure wholesale format at its first Indian store in Amritsar. It will be a one stop shop from where small kirana shop owners, hotels and restaurants, and even the Indian Army will get their supplies. It has already signed on close to 70,000 members, and sales are said to be almost 70 percent more than what had been budgeted.