Founded by Sam Walton, the first Wal$-$Mart store opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in $1962.$ Seventeen years later, annual sales topped $$1$ billion. By the end of January $2002,$ Wal$-$Mart Stores, Inc. $($Wal$-$Mart$),$ was the world$$s largest retailer, with $$218$ billion in sales.

Wal$-$Mart$$s winning strategy in the U$.$S$.$ was based on selling branded products at low cost. Each week, about $100$ million customers visited a Wal$-$Mart store somewhere in the world. The company employed more than $1\mathrm{.}3$ million associates $($Wal$-$Mart$$s term for employees$)$ worldwide through more than $3,200$ stores in the United States and more than $1,100$ units in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, China, Korea, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

In $2001,$ Fortune magazine named Wal$-$Mart the third most admired company in America, and the Financial Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers ranked it as the eighth most admired company in the world. The following year, Wal$-$Mart was named number one on the Fortune $500$ list and was presented with the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership, a presidential award that recognized companies for outstanding achievement in employee and community relations.

Wal$-$Mart enjoyed a $50$ percent market share position in the discount retail industry. Procter & Gamble, Clorox, and Johnson & Johnson were among its nearly $3,000$ suppliers. Though Wal$-$Mart may have been the top customer for consumer product manufacturers, it deliberately ensured it did not become too dependent on any one supplier; no single vendor constituted more than $4$ percent of its overall purchase volume.

About $85$ percent of all the merchandise sold by Wal$-$Mart was shipped through its distribution system to its stores. $($Competitors supplied to their retail outlets on average less than $50$ percent of the merchandise through their own distribution centers.$)$ The company owned a fleet of more than $3,000$ trucks and $12,000$ trailers. $($Most competitors outsourced trucking.$)$ Wal$-$Mart had implemented a satellite network system that allowed information to be shared between the company$$s wide network of stores, distribution centers, and suppliers. The system consolidated orders for goods, enabling the company to buy full truckload quantities without incurring the inventory costs.

Wal$-$Mart$$s value proposition can be summed up as $$everyday low prices for a broad range of goods that are always in stock in convenient geographic locations.$$ It is those aspects of the customer experience that the company over$-$delivers relative to competitors. Under$-$performance on other dimensions, such as ambiance and sales help, is a strategic choice that generates cost savings, which fuel the company$$s price advantage. If the local mom$-$and$-$pop hardware store has survived, it also has a value proposition: convenience, proprietors who have known you for years, free coffee and doughnuts on Saturday mornings, and so on$.$

Question $1)$ What type of strategy has Walmart put in place?

Question $2)$ What are the advantages that Walmart can foresee with this strategy?

Question $3)$ What are the other types of strategies that Walmart can put in place to achieve results in Current business scenario?