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Amazon and Walmart, with more than a trillion dollars in annual revenues combined, are the two largest companies in the world. They have not only redefined the retail industry—Walmart in the 1980s/1990s and Amazon since 2000—but have also been the benchmark for best practices in business (in terms of the use of IT, supply chain, data analytics and customer orientation).

In the coming years, Amazon will probably dethrone Walmart as the world’s largest company, a position that Walmart has occupied for more than two decades. By examining these two companies and their business models in depth, Nirmalya Kumar elucidates the more general phenomenon of incumbents competing with disruptors (e.g., Volkswagen vs Tesla, Marriott vs Airbnb) as well as the move to omnichannel retail, where physical stores must coexist with online retailers.

Clash is a lucid, well-researched and eminently readable discourse on the future of retailing, the economics of e-commerce delivery models and whether its two largest players will collide head-on or coexist in strategic complementarity.
Nirmalya Kumar is Lee Kong Chian Professor of Marketing at the Singapore Management University. Previously, he headed strategy at Tata Sons, reporting to the chairman of the $100-billion Tata Group with 6,75,000 employees. Nirmalya has taught at Columbia University, Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland), London Business School and Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University). He has also been a visiting fellow at BITSoM, Cambridge Judge Business School, Indian School of Business and INSEAD.

Nirmalya is one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy and marketing. As a consultant and speaker, he has worked with over fifty Fortune 500 companies in sixty countries. He has served on more than twelve boards of directors, including those of ACC, Ambuja Cement, Bata India, Tata Chemicals, Ultratech and Zensar.

Thrice included in Thinkers50 (the biannual listing of the top fifty management thinkers in the world), he received their Global Village Award for his contributions to the business community’s understanding of globalization and emerging markets before being inducted into their Hall of Fame.

Authors

Clash: Amazon Vs Walmart