Walmart falls after CEO of more than a decade steps down
Walmart’s stock fell as low as 3% this morning in premarket trading on news that its longtime CEO, Doug McMillon, who helped the company beef up its e-commerce segment against Amazon, will be stepping down.
While Walmart’s sales came in above expectations last quarter, it missed on quarterly earnings. It’s also facing an increasingly dominant Amazon, which is pushing further into Walmart’s territory with same-day grocery delivery in more than 1,000 cities and towns in the US, with plans to expand to 2,300 by the end of the year.
And unlike Walmart, Amazon, in addition to e-commerce and physical stores, has a number of other, much higher-income revenue streams — most notably its fast-growing cloud business, AWS. Earlier this year, Amazon nudged ahead of Walmart in overall revenue, and is expected to continue to build on that lead when Walmart reports Q3 earnings next week.