I'm no real fan of Walmart, but their marketing strategy is not to make the MOST PROFIT as let's say the oil companies....
Their strategy is to value price their merchandise, so to capture all of the market share available to capture...
Their profit marins are consistently around 3.6%....3.6% is a modest amount of profit to be making...so YES, they are getting their labor costs for dirt cheap by producing in China, BUT...they are passing the savings on to the customer....they are not pocketing all of their savings from overseas production and just paying their shareholders more.
Exxon/Mobile has a profit margin that is nearly 300% higher than Walmart's profit margin...
When I saw that they consistently ran at around a modest 3.6% profit margin, is when I stopped bashing walmart for their profits....
Exxon's profit margin is 6.77%.
Pfizer's profit margin is 17.27%.
Microsoft's profit margin is 27.70%.
Would you agree that Exxon's profit margin is modest, as well?
oh, well I was seeing figures of 11% profit margins running for exxon/mobile...at least I thought i had read several articles for several quarters of such earnings.
6.7% is a HEALTHY profit margin...it is almost 200% higher than Walmart's....
Microsoft is just plain gouging for those kinds of profit margins and they can do such because they somewhat have a monopoly or alot of proprietary product to sell, depending on how you want to look at it....
Microsoft is not a commodity, a necessary product for you to survive...that just needs pumping out of the ground...
They used their own creativeness and marketing strategy of not really selling to consumers directly, where we could resist their specific gouging...if it is even gouging...since they CREATED something out of thin air, that we all like....but they primarily sell their products to computer companies, where even if you buy an hp or a Toshiba etc...microsoft sold them their operating systems or rather programs, and they in turn sell us computers with MS technology or programs in them.... the cost of producing these products is near nil...we are paying for their intellectuality... I suppose.
Walmart, although not a commodity like heating oil or gasoline, it is not a company like Microsoft either...where they created something that we all like...they are a middle man of products made and created by others...no ingenuity or proprietary features that can call for a higher mark up or profit.