It seems that Walmart (NYSE:$WMT) isn’t just fighting back on the changes of the retail industry through smart growth strategies, it is also showing hostility towards big-name online retailer Amazon (NASDAQ:$AMZN). In a recent report by DC Velocity, it was revealed that a consultant of the transportation industry recently said at a logistics conference that Walmart is informing trucking companies that it will no longer be working with those who continue or are transporting products for Amazon.
While the actions made by Walmart will no doubt impact the retail industry as well as a number of associated prices, it will also heavily impact one of US’s most important industries: trucking. In particular, it will impact the employees of the trucking industry. The heavy implication is due to the fact that Amazon and Walmart are two of the biggest users of truckload capacity, according to Deutsche Bank (ETR:$DBK). Walmart alone is responsible for about 14% of Swift’s (NYSE:$SWFT) operating revenues.
It isn’t just trucking companies — similar reports made by CNBC revealed that Walmart has requested for its tech partners to discontinue usage of Amazon Web Services. A handful of tech companies revealed to The Wall Street Journal that they couldn’t run applications on Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud platform. When reached out about the situation, WalMart spokesperson Dan Toporek told the Wall Street Journal that WalMart still make use of several applications that run on Amazon Web Services — though he declined to specify which ones and how many. Toporek also acknowledged that WalMart is trying to push for other alternatives instead of using Amazon Web Services.
In an email to CNBC to address the same news, Toporek wrote, “Our vendors have the choice of using any cloud provider that meets their needs and their customers’ needs. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that there are cases in which we’d prefer our most sensitive data isn’t sitting on a competitor’s platform.”
Walmart isn’t the only retailer that is attempting to move away from Amazon’s services. According to the Wall Street Journal, other big-name retail companies have also been asking for their tech partners to find alternatives to Amazon Web Services.
As Amazon makes its move into the grocery sector of retail with the acquisition of Whole Foods (NASDAQ:$WFM), Walmart is desperately trying to gain leverage on the all-powerful online retailer — its stock dropped by 7% following the news. With so many retail stores feeling the impact of the popularity of e-commerce, it seems that Walmart is not taking any chances for anything that might jeopardize its business. Whether retaliations, like cutting off trucking businesses and finding alternatives to Amazon Web Services, will be successful for Walmart or not, however, is yet to be seen.
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