Wal-Mart Moves Import Buying In-House
by January 7, 2002 12:00 am 84 views
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will move all of its import operations in-house beginning Feb. 1. The pending deal was announced in the Business Journal on June 25.
By spring 2002, “Wal-Mart will assume the responsibilities presently handled by PREL,” George Billingsley told the Business Journal last summer.
Billingsley was chairman and CEO of Pacific Resources Export Ltd., which has handled the import operations for Wal-Mart since 1991.
Billingsley said the way Wal-Mart does business with vendor factories will change as a result, but he wouldn’t elaborate on how it might change.
Billingsley said a Wal-Mart executive told him, “The way PREL does it is not in our plan.”
“We’ve decided to do it on our own, so we are now putting offices around the world,” John Menzer, CEO of Wal-Mart’s international division, told the Reuters news agency.
Wal-Mart is interviewing and hiring some PREL employees.
PREL was an exclusive buying agent that inspected about 5,000 of Wal-Mart’s 7,000 vendor factories.