Walmart's Q2 FY2027 earnings made China its strongest international market. International operating profit grew 16.6% year-on-year, with the report attributing the rise to "China and India"; on a constant-currency basis, China's net sales reached US$7 billion, up 20.7%. The single engine behind that growth is Sam's Club: in fiscal 2026, Sam's full-channel sales in China broke through ¥140 billion, contributing more than 80% of China-region revenue; average annual sales per store topped ¥2 billion, several times that of a conventional hypermarket; by the first half of 2026 paid memberships in China exceeded 10.7 million — membership fees alone yielding roughly ¥3 billion a year.
Why a ¥260 Ticket Makes Every Store Opening a Public Event
When the Jinan and Qingdao stores opened on the same day in May, some consumers were already queueing outside at 2 a.m.; within an hour of opening at the Qingdao location, shopping carts had been emptied, staff had to be dispatched from a neighboring city in an emergency restock, and a provincial bus operator even launched a dedicated shuttle between the two locations. Such scenes replay with every Sam's Club grand opening in China. On the Jinan opening day, all-day traffic passed 50,000 visits, with the midday queue estimated at three hours.
Pull the phenomenon apart and Sam's playbook is in fact simple: roughly 4,000 SKUs — about a fifth of a conventional hypermarket — completes the "selection" work for the member; a Swiss roll under ¥4 and a croissant at ¥1.65 anchor foot traffic; large-pack, high-value items handle household stocking; and the ¥260 annual membership card filters the customer base. Consumers come to believe this card delivers more consistent quality, lower search cost, and a stronger sense of psychological security. Sam's is not selling merchandise. It is selling certainty.
Where demand is this strong, supply is accelerating. Under its "100-store plan," Sam's intends to add another 13 stores in 2026 and has set a same-store-sales-growth target of 15%. As of July 31, 2026, Sam's was operating 67 stores in China — net add of 4 over the quarter, 11 new openings in the trailing twelve months.
The Crack on the Other Side of Scale: From "Paying ¥260 for Things I Can Get Downstairs" to a Leadership Swap
But Sam's expansion has not been free of cracks. In July 2025, mass-market brands — Orion, Weilong, Liu liu mei — were listed, and a number of well-regarded private-label items quietly disappeared from the shelves. Members asked why they were paying a ¥260 membership for things they could buy downstairs at the corner store. In the wake of the backlash, Sam's China changed its helmsman: Andrew Miles (the predecessor) had laid out three principles — limited SKUs, high value at low gross margin, strict operating discipline — and under his watch the store count had grown from 8 to more than 50; he retired in early 2025, with Walmart international executive Jane Ewing serving briefly as acting head; that October, Liu Peng — formerly general manager of Tmall Global and president of Alibaba's B2C retail group — was appointed president of the Sam's Club format. Less than a year later he was also named chairman of Sam's China.
The logic behind the swap is digital. Digital orders account for 55% of Sam's China, far above Walmart International's roughly 30% and the global 24%; more than 500 forward warehouses and cloud warehouses underpin this volume's instant-retail capability. One view is that a business with majority digital orders needs someone fluent in platform operations, instant retail and membership data — not a traditional buyer-manager. His Tmall Global track record maps to Sam's core imported-goods middle-class consumer; his B2C self-operated retail experience maps to the end-to-end stack of assortment, supply chain and fulfillment. Walmart's personnel choice reads as a bet on using a digital-retail playbook to install a replicable operating system onto a fast-expanding Sam's.
Wo-ji-xian: A Reason to Come Back for "People Who Don't Want to Pay ¥260"
On the other side of Sam's sprint stands the steady shrinkage of the Walmart hypermarket format. According to the China Chain Store and Franchise Association, by April 2025 the combined footprint of Walmart hypermarket and Sam's Club in China was 334 stores — a net drop of 108 from 442 in 2019. Walmart rarely talks about "store closures"; what it talks about is "upgrade and transformation," and its private label Wo-ji-xian is being cast as the path that lets the hypermarket grow again.
Wo-ji-xian was first created in 2019 and in its early phase covered only prepared foods and bakery items. In 2023 it was strategically integrated, absorbing the packaged-food SKU set that had previously sat under the Member's Mark ("Huiyi") brand. In November 2025 it completed a brand refresh, launching the tagline "Simpler, for Freshness" ("简单为鲜") — simpler ingredient lists, contract manufacturing with leading brands (Qiaqia for nuts, Qianhe for soy sauce, Sanyuan for dairy), simpler purchase decisions, and "everyday low price" sustained by end-to-end efficiency. Outsiders call it a "Sam's Club budget substitute," and it targets price-sensitive consumers diverted by e-commerce and community fresh-food stores: where Sam's packages for stocking, Wo-ji-xian pushes smaller formats, lower unit prices, and individually wrapped single-serve packs — the goal is to pull young shoppers who "don't want to pay roughly ¥260 a year" back through the Walmart hypermarket doors.
After consumers flagged that a large-format milk carton couldn't be finished before it went off, the team spent seven months developing a small-format "Little Green Bottle"; condiments went through salt reduction, with cuts of 30–46%; snack ingredient lists are stripped to the bone, the "Angus Beef Crispy Stick" listing only beef and salt. The playbook has produced hits: its "4.0 Pure Milk" went viral on social media in 2025 and has since sold nearly 2.5 million units; in May 2026 the ¥9.9/litre milk at the Shenyang store remained chronically out of stock, and resellers drove the price up to ¥16.8, forcing the store to set up a dedicated sales area. Flavor trends are chased too — Guizhou sour-soup-flavored chips, mint beef-jerky-flavored crisps, Dai-style pounded-chicken-foot chips — moving the traffic code of the "Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan bistro" onto the snack shelf.
But for all the publicity, doubt remains. Can "feedback-driven" product iteration scale across a SKU base approaching a thousand, or will it always be a handful of repeated showcases? Wo-ji-xian is still mainly contract manufactured and label-attached; it has not yet moved to genuine "co-development" with its suppliers; "clean ingredient lists plus regional flavors" is a playbook everyone in the category is doubling down on. One consumer told Guancha.cn that the new launches always catch her eye, but the products she actually likes are rare — the "Low-Sugar Hefung-qingxia Double Rice Drink" sounds refreshing but tastes like an ordinary rice drink, and the four-bottle 230 g set is ¥19.99; "the other three bottles are still in my fridge." Driving a first purchase via novelty is not hard; driving a second is — and if acquisition traffic runs ahead of product depth, "listening" devolves into gimmick-driven innovation.
Two Ends at Once: A Bet on Running Two Curves Inside Consumer Stratification
Walmart is also piloting smaller-footprint formats. Its first Wo-ji-xian community store opened in Shenzhen in January 2026 — roughly 500 square meters, a curated assortment of about 2,000 SKUs, focused on the high-frequency "five meals a day" occasion; the industry regularly benchmarks it against Hema's "Super Hema NB" and similar community-discount peers. The legacy hypermarket stock is also being remodeled: in April the post-upgrade Chengdu Kaide Plaza store saw its footprint compressed from 7,000 to 3,600 square meters, with the SKU count trimmed to about 10,000.
Today's Chinese consumer market is visibly stratified. On one end sit middle-class households willing to pay for certainty and quality, not reluctant to hand over ¥260 a year for membership; on the other sit price-sensitive customers who wear "extreme value-for-money" on their sleeve and who pinch every yuan. Walmart's playbook is to use two formats to catch the two ends — Sam's defending those willing to pay; Wo-ji-xian fighting back for the share diverted into e-commerce and community group buying. The other side of the earnings report explains why this is necessary. Walmart US same-store sales grew 2.6%, the slowest in more than six years; the CFO attributed the slowdown to fuel — the national average exceeding US$4 per gallon, and "once gas hits US$4, consumers psychologically begin to make trade-offs." Most of the period's sharp operating-profit growth was powered by a one-off tariff refund rather than by any improvement in operating efficiency. With consumers on both sides of the Pacific tightening their belts, "catching both ends" is the only answer left to a retail giant.
Sam's Club's ¥140 billion in China proves one thing: even in a cautious overall consumption environment, "certainty" still has people willing to pay — the ¥260 membership is not selling a discount, it is selling the relief of choice being made for you. But the cracks in Sam's (the backlash when mass-market brands hit the shelves) and the doubts hanging over Wo-ji-xian (can contract manufacturing keep producing hits) show where the difficulty of a two-track strategy lies. It is not in "catching two ends," but in making both curves beat the broader market: Sam's must prove that membership can scale without losing quality; Wo-ji-xian must prove that "feedback-listening" is sustainable product depth, not one-off marketing. "Catching both ends" is not a new story — almost every retail peer is telling it now. The real difficulty is getting the paying end and the value-for-money end to stand up at the same time on a slide in overall traffic. Walmart's answer this quarter: at one end, ¥140 billion a year; at the other end, still sitting in the fridge.