Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    U.S. hypermart retailer Walmart Stores opened four more stores in China during the New Year holiday, including one in Shenzhen, in hopes of raising profitability in the country’s competitive retail sector.

    The new outlets came after six other stores opened in the country in December. The Shenzhen store, located in the Buji area, is the 26th Walmart store in the city and seventh in Longgang District. Covering an area of 7,780 square meters, it offers 300 parking spaces.

    Despite growing challenges from robust online sales, the world’s largest retailer promised earlier last year to open 115 new brick-and-mortar stores in the coming three years and to put more effort into its operations in smaller cities.

    In May last year, the retailer started a trial of an O2O platform in Shenzhen, underlining the retailer’s initiative to capture growth from e-commerce and its willingness to remodel itself into an O2O firm.

    “In the past year, we’ve been committed to becoming an O2O [online to offline] firm, offering customers seamless services from online to offline,” said Sean Clarke, chief executive of Walmart China.

    The O2O platform, Walmart To Go, was expanded to Guangzhou and Dongguan in December and will gradually expand its services nationwide, the retailer said.

    “We have strong confidence in the Shenzhen market, where we entered in 1997 and we have a Walmart supermarket outlet — Walmart Shekou store,” said Fan Ping, a senior operation manager for Walmart China. “The new Buji store will further improve our store network, allowing us to provide better services.”

    The retailer was plagued with a tide of store closures last year, as it shut down more than a dozen stores in China. It has a store optimization plan to close 9 percent of nearly 400 outlets in China, which contributed just 2 to 3 percent of sales revenue to the company.

    Meanwhile, it spent 370 million yuan (US$57.10 million) to upgrade 50 of its present stores and opened 20 delivery centers last year. As a result, its sales in China rose 2.9 percent in the third quarter of last year, the retailer said.