Walmart Is 'Testing Anything And Everything' To Win The Retail Battle, Analyst Says

Wal-Mart Stores Inc WMT impressed investors Tuesday morning with a glimpse of its near-term future at the 2017 Investment Community Meeting, sending shares higher by over 5 percent.

Heading into the company's presentation, many investors were assuming that Walmart's "environment had gotten materially worse," Barclays' retail analyst Karen Short said as a guest on CNBC's "Squawk Alley." Investors short the stock also hoped the presentation would serve as a "reset" for the company, but the complete opposite occurred.

If anything, the overall retail environment had gotten worse because of Walmart's aggressive new plans, the analyst continued. This is demonstrated in management's "very robust" guidance for the coming fiscal year as the company is leveraging its physical store with its e-commerce unit.

"They are acting very rapidly and decisively and if you think about what they are doing the are testing anything and everything in the new world of retail," she said. "No one in retail that we cover comes even close to doing that besides Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN and that's why Walmart is winning."

Finally, this begs the question is Walmart sufficiently positioned to compete with Amazon and the answer is yes, Short also argued. Walmart boasts 10 times the number of stores Amazon gained through its Whole Foods acquisition and customers who shop at physical stores tend to spend more than they do online which gives Walmart a key advantage in this regard.

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Image Credit: By Walmart from Bentonville, USA (Walmart's Aerodynamic Trucks) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons