Veteran of Google and Amazon joins retailer as it ramps up its ad business, e-commerce

By Sarah Nassauer 

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (May 29, 2019).

Walmart Inc. is hiring a former executive from Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google to lead global technology, creating a new senior role as the world's biggest retailer ramps up its efforts to take on Amazon.

Suresh Kumar will become Walmart's global chief technology officer and chief development officer starting in July, the company said Monday. Mr. Kumar will report to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon.

Walmart's longtime U.S. technology chief, Jeremy King, left the company in March.

Mr. Kumar will oversee both consumer-facing and internal technology efforts. He will help Walmart speed up its digital transformation, Mr. McMillon said in a blog post. "We have a long way to go," he said.

Walmart is working to becoming an increasingly tech-focused company, buying up e-commerce startups, investing heavily to boost online sales, adding more grocery-delivery options and working to ramp up its digital ad revenue. The bulk of Walmart's revenues and profits came from around 4,600 U.S. stores as of the most recent quarter.

Mr. Kumar, 54 years old, is a vice president at Google where he worked on the company's network advertising as well as advertising on Gmail and parts of YouTube. He previously spent about four years at Microsoft Corp. working on cloud infrastructure. Before that he spent nearly 15 years at Amazon, where he oversaw about 500 engineers working on core retail functions, such as pricing, supply chain and vendor management.

Quarterly sales at Walmart have risen steadily for over four years, as lower prices and online investments help the retail behemoth grab market share from weaker retail competitors and online sales rise. Those efforts have hit profits, leading Walmart to increasingly focus on cutting costs elsewhere. Walmart's e-commerce sales are still a small percentage of overall sales, around $15.7 billion in the U.S. as of last fiscal year ended Jan. 31.

Mr. Kumar -- who will be based in Walmart's Sunnyvale, Calif., office -- will "set out technical strategy, combining advances in computing with Walmart's strengths" in customer service, Mr. McMillon said in the blog post. Walmart's current chief information officer, Clay Johson, and all unit CTOs will report to Mr. Kumar. Marc Lore, Walmart's head of U.S. e-commerce, will continue to report to Mr. McMillon directly, a spokesman said.

Mr. Kumar holds a Ph.D. in engineering from Princeton University and a bachelor of technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, in Chennai.

Write to Sarah Nassauer at sarah.nassauer@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 29, 2019 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)

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