Walmart, in full 

Walmart, Inc., formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.,

American operator of discount stores that was one of the world’s biggest
retailers and among the world’s largest corporations. Company
headquarters are in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart, Inc. engages in retail
and wholesale business. The Company offers an assortment of merchandise
and services at everyday low prices. ... The Walmart International segment
manages supercenters, supermarkets, hypermarkets, warehouse clubs, and cash
& carry outside of the United States.

Walmart Inc. ( /ˈwɔːlmɑːrt/; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational

retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores,
and grocery stores, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas.[10] The company was founded
by Sam Walton in 1962 and incorporated on October 31, 1969. It also owns and
operates Sam's Club retail warehouses.[11][12] As of July 31, 2020, Walmart has 11,496 stores
and clubs in 27 countries, operating under 56 different names.[2][3][13] The company operates
under the name Walmart in the United States and Canada, as Walmart de México y
Centroamérica in Mexico and Central America, as Asda in the United Kingdom, as the Seiyu
Group in Japan, and as Flipkart Wholesale in India. It has wholly owned operations
in Argentina, Chile, Canada, and South Africa. Since August 2018, Walmart holds only a
minority stake in Walmart Brasil, which was renamed Grupo Big in August 2019, with 20
percent of the company's shares, and private equity firm Advent International holding 80
percent ownership of the company.
Walmart is the world's largest company by revenue, with US$514.405 billion, according to
the Fortune Global 500 list in 2019. It is also the largest private employer in the world with
2.2 million employees. It is a publicly traded family-owned business, as the company is
controlled by the Walton family. Sam Walton's heirs own over 50 percent of Walmart
through both their holding company Walton Enterprises and their individual holdings.
[14]
Walmart was the largest United States grocery retailer in 2019, and 65 percent of
Walmart's US$510.329 billion sales came from U.S. operations.[4][15]
Walmart was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972. By 1988, it was the most
profitable retailer in the U.S.,[16] and it had become the largest in terms of revenue by October
1989.[17] The company was originally geographically limited to the South and lower Midwest,
but it had stores from coast to coast by the early 1990s. Sam's Club opened in New Jersey in
November 1989, and the first California outlet opened in Lancaster, in July 1990. A Walmart
in York, Pennsylvania, opened in October 1990, the first main store in the Northeast.[18]
Walmart's investments outside the U.S. have seen mixed results. Its operations and
subsidiaries in Canada, the United Kingdom, Central America, South America, and China are
highly successful, but its ventures failed in Germany and South Korea.

Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962

and focused its early growth in rural areas, thereby avoiding direct
competition with retailing giants such as Sears and Kmart. As it
grew, the company developed new retail formats, including Sam’s
Club discount warehouses (1983) and Wal-Mart Supercenters
(1988). Within a decade of opening the combination grocery and
merchandise Supercenters, Wal-Mart had become one of the largest
grocers in the United States. An emphasis on customer attention
(e.g., direct mail advertising), cost controls (e.g., low-cost imports),
and efficiencies in its distribution networks (e.g., regional
warehousing) helped Wal-Mart become the largest retailer in the
United States in 1990.

It moved into international markets one year later with the opening
of a store in Mexico, and growth continued, either through new
stores or the acquisition of established retailers, in countries such
as Canada, China, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The
company experienced a decline in sales immediately following
Walton’s death in 1992 but rebounded with the introduction of the
company’s house brand Great Value in 1993. In the years after
Walton’s death, the company was less fiscally frugal, quickly
accumulating corporate debt in order to finance such new strategies
as a group of additional Wal-Mart Supercenters. The financial risk
paid off: by 1995 Wal-Mart’s sales had doubled, by 1999 the
company had become the world’s largest private employer, and by
2001 its total sales surpassed those of Exxon Mobil, ranking Wal-
Mart as the largest corporation in the world.