MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The chief executive of Mexican retailer Walmex on Thursday said the store could continue to grow its store footprint in Latin America’s No. 2 economy, after 2023 marked its fastest year for adding new stores in a decade.
The Walmart unit said in an earnings call it had opened 162 new stores across Mexico and Central America last year, including 101 in the last three months of the year.
Through 2024, Chief Executive Guilherme Loureiro said the company would focus on improving public perception of their prices.
Loureiro said that while the company’s hypermarkets were doing well and should continue to improve this year, its smaller Walmart Express stores had suffered from “a sequence of bad decisions.”
“We could write a book about everything to do wrong,” Loureiro said, pointing to mistakes in how the group tried to position the brand between premium and low-cost rivals, saying the group had been slow to fix customer complaints.
“Now we have an opportunity and the actions we take should be accretive to our results this year,” he said. “It’s important to expand but also to maintain our fleet in good shape.”
The call came a day after Walmex posted a fourth-quarter profit that edged up just over 1%, as it grew market share in the fruit and vegetables sector but was hit by rehabilitation costs after the deadly Hurricane Otis, which struck Mexican resort town Acapulco, and political protests in Guatemala.
Loureiro said the firm had also seen a slowdown in sales of its non-consumable merchandise, which includes clothes and electronics, as more buyers turned from brick-and-mortar stores to online options.
(Reporting by Sarah Morland and Aida Pelaez-Fernandez; Editing by Kylie Madry)
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