Walmart has shared plans to invest heavily into the ecommerce side of the business, as it attempts to move away from its brick-and-mortar stores. The company currently has over 11,000 stores around the world, but CEO Doug McMillon said in the announcement that the company “over time is going to look more like an ecommerce company". Currently the top competitor in Walmart's biggest markets is Amazon, which currently makes more than seven times the amount of money online per year as Walmart. However, Walmart has also announced that it has doubled the number of shares it previously held in the Chinese online marketplace JD. Following multiple high-profile deals so far in 2016, including a 3 billion US dollar acquisition of Jet.com, Walmart announced that it now owned over 10% of the shares in JD, up from 5%, in order to help the company “grow ecommerce even faster in China”.Â
