2024-06-11 14:20:21 ET
Walmart Inc. (WMT)
Oppenheimer's 24th Annual Virtual Consumer Growth and E-Commerce Conference
June 11, 2024, 09:45 AM ET
Company Participants
John Furner - President and CEO, Walmart U.S.
Conference Call Participants
Rupesh Parikh - Oppenheimer
Presentation
Rupesh Parikh
Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us at Oppenheimer's 24th Annual Consumer Growth and E-Commerce Conference. My name is Rupesh Parikh. I'm the Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst here at Oppenheimer. I'm very excited to introduce our next presenting company, Walmart. Walmart remains a top pick for us, and we continue to see a strong outperformance case over the next 12 to 18 months, driven by share gains and the potential for margin expansion over time.
Joining us today are President and CEO of Walmart U.S., John Furner and Senior Director to Investor Relations, Kary Brunner. So thank you all for being here today. The format of today's session will be a fireside chat. We'll go through a number of questions that I prepared.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Rupesh Parikh
So John, I wanted to kick it off with a couple of macro questions. So Walmart U.S. continues to see strong top line results in traffic. However, discretionary has remained relatively soft in recent quarters as consumers manage budgets in the face of multiple quarters of inflationary pressures and are potentially still lapping pandemic buying. So how would you describe the overall health of your consumer as we sit here today? And what are your expectations for the balance of the year?
John Furner
Rupesh, well, first, thanks for having us, and thanks for the interest in the company. It's great to see you in person last week as well for our annual shareholders' meeting and associated event. We are -- I think let me talk about the business, and I'll definitely address your question. We're seeing consistency amongst consumer groups over the last several quarters. We talked about that a few days ago.
And I think some of the factors that are weighing in are strong employment another 272,000 job creation report last week. Wages have grown pretty significantly in a lot of sectors over the last few years and wages at Walmart amongst our associate group has grown about 30% over the last five years, certainly has been some inflation and put pressure on consumers....
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Walmart Inc. (WMT) Oppenheimer's 24th Annual Virtual Consumer Growth and E-Commerce Conference (Transcript)