R&D crucial to Walmart's battle against Amazon

Walmart is all set to engage in a battle with Amazon India, and for the war chest, it is relying on its R&D centre.

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The Bengaluru centre is currently developing a number of Walmart’s most important technology platforms, which will ensure best prices, efficiently delivery, and lowest possible logistics cost.

Jeremy King, Walmart's CTO for US stores and e-commerce, told TOI that one of the first technology teams that the company hired for the Bengaluru centre did competitive analysis of prices.

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"They have been really successful. Now we are building the new-generation version of this. We have acquired a number of companies recently (Jet.com, Modcloth, Shoebuy , Moosejaw), all of which have added millions of new products. So we have to scale the system," he said.

The $486-billion company, which was founded in 1962 in Arkansas, US, traditionally follows the practice of offering the lowest price on any product. For this, they have to have an efficient team to keep an eye on prices offered by every competitor.

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"Just collecting the data from all the competitors is itself a huge problem. Collecting that and matching with our prices is a huge machine learning problem. Some people might be selling it in packs of, say six, so we have to figure out what the price of one is. And do this across millions of items," King said.

The Bengaluru R&D centre was established five years ago, and now has 1200-strong workforce, out of which 500 were added just last year.