Zaid

Walmart has been one of the best performing retail stocks in the market, and the company recently crossed the $1 trillion market cap for the first time ever.

So in today's episode, we'll break down how Walmart went from a dinosaur brick and mortar retailer to an absolute digital powerhouse and a legit competitor to Amazon.

We'll dive into the numbers behind the transformation and some of the challenges they face moving forward, including a new CEO.

We got a great one for you today.

Let's dive in.

Now to understand where Walmart is today, you have to go back to 2014.

And honestly, things were not looking great for them.

At the time, Amazon was absolutely torching the retail industry.

Online shopping was exploding and Walmart, which had spent decades dominating the giant physical stores, suddenly looked like a dinosaur.

They had very little e-commerce presence at the time and their same store sales were declining.

That's when Walmart's board made a bet on a guy named Doug McMillan.

He took over as CEO in February of 2014.

Now, McMillan is a Walmart lifer.

He started working at Walmart as a teenager in the 1980s, unloading trucks at an Arkansas warehouse.

And he literally worked his way up from the warehouse floor to becoming the CEO of the company.

And when he took over, he focused on modernizing Walmart.

He doubled down on e-commerce by acquiring a company called Jet.com for $3 billion in 2016.

A lot of people at the time thought that was an overpay, and while Jet.com didn't really work out, it brought e-commerce talent into Walmart.

Jet.com founder Mark Lurie ran Walmart's e-commerce business and turned it into a fast-growing business that it is today.

But beyond the Jet.com acquisition, CEO Doug McMillan also invested billions of dollars in making Walmart's supply chain automated and tech-driven.