Walmart said it will expand its fulfillment capacity and efficiency with four additional large-scale fulfillment centers coming online in the second quarter.
The company has committed $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion in capital this year for its digital and ecommerce businesses, said Walmart Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley on the company’s fourth quarter analyst call.
Neil Ashe, president and chief executive officer of global ecommerce for Walmart, said on the call that when fully operational, the new centers along with other nodes will position Walmart to serve the vast majority of the U.S. population at low costs.
During the 2014 holiday season, Ashe said Walmart had the first major test of its in-house Pangaea technology platform. Between the company’s large-scale fulfillment center in Texas, its existing fulfillment centers, distribution centers and stores, Walmart shipped a record number of online orders on Cyber Monday.
“We’ll also continue to fulfill our promise to deliver orders to customers when and where they want them,” said Ashe. He added Walmart’s data scientists have built algorithms that determine the assortment that needs to be placed in its different nodes, and the optimal node to tap for shipping each order.