The combination of the US retail sales report for July and comments from Walmart executives are a strong endorsement on the health of the US and global consumer. It's a company with better data than any US statistics agency and is often candid on what it's seeing.
Here are some quotes from the now-completed conference call:
- Doug McMillon (CEO): "So far, we aren't experiencing a weaker consumer overall."
- John David Rainey (CFO): "I know everyone is looking for some piece of information, maybe indicates further weakness with our members and our customers, we're not in it."
- Rainey: "Our outlook for the back half of the year is really for more of a continuation of what we've seen even in the first couple of weeks of August here, things have been remarkably consistent."
- Rainey: "We're seeing higher engagement across income cohorts, with upper income households continuing to account for the majority of gains even while we grow sales and share among middle and lower-income households."
- US CEO John Furner: "back-to-school, it started off strong this last couple of weeks. I've been and a number of operators have been in stores all over the country, where we're looking at how ready they are for back to college and back to school. About 50% of our customers still say they have a lot of shopping left to do. We have over 2 million school list uploaded on the site. So we still have a lot of strength ahead of us. So good start.
Walmart boosted its sales outlook for their fiscal year that ends in March and comments suggested they're still being cautious.
Rainey: "the economic and geopolitical backdrop that we operate in is perhaps more uncertain than normal, and we're not completely immune from the volatility that can result from this. And while we have not seen any additional frame of consumer health in our business, other economic data out there, as well as the state of affairs globally, would suggest that it's prudent to remain appropriately cautious with our outlook.
