With more than 22 years of retail sector experience, Wal-Mart de Mexico Executive President and CEO Eduardo Solórzano is one of the most respected executives in the Mexican retail sector. That’s no small feat, considering Mexico is Wal-Mart's third largest market after the United States and the UK. Solórzano was instrumental in implementing Wal-Mart’s “Every Day Low Price” strategy in Mexico – one that has subsequently revolutionized the retail sector in Mexico.

Wal-Mart is market leader in Mexico via its majority-owned subsidiary Wal-Mart de Mexico SA de CV (Walmex). The latter, formerly called Cifra, opened its first store trading under the Aurrera banner in 1958. In 1991, Cifra formed a joint venture with Wal-Mart to develop Sam's Club in Mexico, and by 1997 the world’s largest retailer had acquired control of the company. In February 2000, the retailer changed its name from Cifra SA de CV to Wal-Mart de Mexico SA de CV, listed on the Stock Exchange as Walmex.

Despite expansion elsewhere in Latin America, Mexico still accounts for around two thirds of Wal-Mart's sales in the region. In 2007, Wal-Mart de Mexico posted sales of USD20.6 billion, and as of September 2008 the company employed more than 160,000 people, operating 1,104 stores and 13 distribution centers in 194 cities nationwide.

Executive President and CEO of Wal-Mart de Mexico, Eduardo Solórzano Morales
Source: Wal-Mart

Since joining Wal-Mart in 1985, Solórzano has worked extensively across the organization in areas such as operations, merchandising and logistics. In 1998, he was appointed Director of Food for Wal-Mart Supercenter and later as Vice President. He was then promoted to Executive Vice President for Self-Service and later appointed as Chief Operating Officer. In early 2005 he took over as Executive President and Chief Executive Officer of Wal-Mart de Mexico. During the 1990s, Solórzano worked for four years as Commercial Director of Soriana, Mexico’s second largest retailer.

Solórzano also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Banco Wal-Mart de Mexico Adelante and is a director of the following organizations: Wal-Mart Central America, The Wal-Mart de Mexico Foundation, The Mexican Institute for Competitiveness and the Retail Council of Coca-Cola Latin America. Lastly, he is a Trustee for the Council of Communication.

Wal-Mart's main international format Wal-Mart Supercenter is the retailer’s second largest operation in Mexico after the local Bodega Aurrera superstore banner

Source: PlanetRetail: www.PlanetRetail.net

Solórzano, a naturalized Mexican citizen, was born in Managua, Nicaragua in 1957 and was educated in Mexico, earning a BS in Economics from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and an MS in Economics from the University of the Americas. He is married with one daughter and likes playing golf and reading.

Industry Affairs News

Association Leadership

GMA Names Pamela Bailey as New President & CEO

On December 9, the GMA Board of Directors appointed Pamela Bailey to serve as the new President and Chief Executive Officer of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Bailey has served as president and CEO of the Personal Care Products Council since 2005. “I am extremely pleased that Pam Bailey has agreed to take the helm of GMA,” said Doug Conant, president and CEO of Campbell Soup Company and chairman of the GMA board. “In these trying economic times, GMA’s leadership is critical to the continued success of the food, beverage and consumer packaged goods industry. Pam’s extensive experience in government service, bipartisan approach to public policy, success as a trade association leader and her strong credentials in the consumer packaged goods industry made her an obvious choice to position GMA to meet the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.” Bailey will begin at GMA in January.

Supply Chain & Technology

Manufacturing Excellence Share Group Looks to Streamline Performance

The newly-formed GMA Manufacturing Excellence Share Group held its first meeting in October in Washington, focusing on how to use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to streamline the manufacturing process. The share group, composed of senior level executives who oversee manufacturing at their organizations, heard presentations from Patrick Feyten, senior vice president of manufacturing at Kraft Foods, and Mark Sutcliffe, president of CDC Factory Software. The group will take a deeper dive into the KPI discussion at its next meeting in January and discuss Manufacturing Execution Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning.

Contact: Jeanne Iglesias

IS/LD 2009 to Feature Insights from Food Lion, Hy-Vee

The 2009 GMA Information Systems & Logistics Distribution (IS/LD) Conference will bring together technology and logistics executives to look at recall management, building relationships, emerging technologies, developing custom supply chains and more. The IS/LD Conference, April 5 -8 at the Doral Golf Resort & Spa in Miami, Florida, will once again be co-located with FMI’s Supply Chain Conference, with joint general sessions on Monday and Wednesday mornings, as well as several joint networking functions. Key breakout sessions include:

Food Lion and Kraft Foods on how the joint use of data leads to increased sales, tighter inventory control and better store execution.
Hy-Vee, Inc. and Hormel Foods on how manufacturers and retailers can collaborate to reduce transportation costs and decrease environmental impact.
Groupe Danone’s Chief Information Officer E. Jeffery Hutchinson on how his organization is driving productivity and growth through emerging technologies.

Visit the IS/LD Web site www.gmaisld.com to register and forward program information to personnel within your organization.

Program Contact: Michelle Marcoot

Sponsorship & Exhibit Contact: Jonathan Downey

Industry Performance

GMA’s CFO Committee Holds First Meeting, Discusses Operating in Tough Economy

A new GMA committee focused on enhancing the industry’s ability to drive profits and growth met for the first time last month in Washington. GMA’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Committee, led by Chairman Don Mulligan, executive vice president and chief financial officer of General Mills, heard presentations from McKinsey & Company on the state of retail in the current economy, as well as from Bain & Company on creating shareholder value under tough economic conditions. “As the future of the global economy remains uncertain, we felt it was more important than ever to convene a group of the industry’s top financial experts to address common challenges and develop creative solutions for weathering the bleak economy,” said GMA Senior Manager of Industry Performance Brooke Weizmann.

Highlights from the meeting included a cross-functional roundtable discussion facilitated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as discussion surrounding policy initiatives of the new Administration, cash flow forecasting and standardized risk evaluation metrics. The Committee also heard about GMA’s government and political initiatives from GMA General Counsel Jim Skiles, and Vice President of Political Affairs Michael McShane. During dinner the evening prior, journalist Clive Crook, whose work has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times and Atlantic Monthly, shed light on the new political economy. The dinner and meeting were sponsored by GMA Associate Member PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Contact: Brooke Weizmann

Sales & Sales Promotion

GMA, NEW, A.T. Kearney to Perform Industry Review of Talent Management Trends

A new GMA report conducted in partnership with the Network of Executive Women (NEW) will explore the need for the CPG industry to recruit, retain and develop sales professionals with strong performance and leadership potential. The GMA Sales Committee and NEW have selected Associate Member A.T. Kearney to lead the project, which will review trends in sales force talent management. The report will look at the current state of sales force talent management in the CPG Industry; sales force talent management strategies/programs and key learnings to date; and industry models for success. The project will be launched in early 2009 with a final report to be released in the spring.

Contact: Brian Lynch

GMA, Deloitte Host Shopper Marketing Webinar

GMA and Deloitte Consulting LLP hosted a webinar on December 11 to share key findings from the recently-released GMA-Deloitte report, Delivering the Promise of Shopper Marketing: Mastering Execution for Competitive Advantage. Over 200 people participated in the webinar, which addressed effective models of collaboration, linkages between strategy, capabilities and deployment as well as understanding how retailers, manufacturers and other stakeholders define and measure success. A copy of the full report can be found here.

Contact: Brian Lynch

Quick Insights

Trends and Facts on Touch Points With Shoppers

By John Dranow

As part of a season’s greetings, I wanted to present the readers of IAR with a few facts and trends we’ve uncovered during the past year. The first is a confirmation of what we’ve known for some time -- across the food and health & beauty care categories nearly half of purchase decisions are made in-store. This continues to have obvious ramifications for both retailers and manufacturers trying to impact shopper’s buying behavior.

Shopper-based segmentations that identify who is reached pre-store through branding and in-store through displays, packaging and store promotions can help refine and optimize marketing activities. For instance, because display and packaging drive in-store category impulsivity, critical decisions need to be made to determine where and how to place product so that the right shoppers are exposed to these in-store stimuli. Similarly, because promotions drive in-store product/brand choices, tools like shelf talkers and banners can be used to drive impulsivity and purchases.

Here are a few demographic stats to provide context to these trends--

- The pre-store brand-shopper is more likely to be 50 years old or more

- Younger shoppers are more sensitive to in-store triggers

- Asian-American & African-American shoppers are more likely to be driven by store promotions in food categories

- Hispanic shoppers are driven by displays and packaging in food and by store promotions in health and beauty care categories

- Promotions are an important driver of purchase for food in grocery channels while brand and display drives food product choice within mass channels

- When it comes to health and beauty care items, brand is much more important in grocery and mass channels and promotions are more important in driving purchase decisions in drug channels

Looking at the pre-store versus in-store marketing spend without a shopper-centric context can lead to poor retail executions. Integrating shopper-centric insights with marketing spend strategies can lead to optimizing in-store promotions.

Contact: SmartRevenue

Industry Research

GMA Research Shows Sustainability Initiatives Must Go Beyond Packaging

Companies are looking for creative ways to implement sustainable practices into their business models beyond just packaging, according to GMA’s newly released report on sustainability. GMA, Deloitte Consulting, the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute and Hartness International teamed up for the study, Sustainability: From the Boardroom to the Breakroom, which also shows that manufacturing and supply chain operations provide yet another opportunity for companies to be more environmentally sustainable. The study also discusses how to meet changing customer needs in a sustainable and cost effective manner as more requests are made for frequent deliveries of mixed pallets. Download the report here. Contact: Jill Johnson

Report Examines Role of Disruptive Global Forces on Organizations

New research from the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by global management consulting firm PRTM examines the need for organizations to anticipate and evaluate global disruptive forces. The report, Global Disruptors: Steering Through the Storms, includes analysis of a global survey of 242 executives and business leaders. Key findings include:

Resource, markets and policy disruptors are forcing companies to change how they do business. Forty-nine percent of respondents considered the growth and decline of markets, economies and competitors across geographies as having a large or very large impact on their business in the next three years.
Change will come in the areas most important to business success. The three areas that executives believe are likely to undergo greatest change in response to global disruptors - organizational structure and talent management; customer operations; and product operations - are the same three areas that contribute most to the performance of their business.
Top performers move early, and they expect to keep moving. Winning companies are adaptable and are thus able not only able to weather storms that arise, but make any storm, however threatening, work to their advantage.

More information can be found here.

GMA Leadership Profile

Tracy VanBibber

Current Position:

Senior Vice President, Sales

The Henkel/Dial Corporation, 4 years

Industry Leadership:

GMA – Co-Vice Chair, Sales Committee

GMA - Shopper Marketing and Sustainability Project Sub-Committees

GMA - MSM Committee 2006-present

Progressive Grocer - Top Women in Grocery 2007

NACDS - Membership/Sponsor

Network of Executive Women - Executive Member and Presenter

Arizona Leaders Forum - Presenter

2008 United Way Executive Leader - Dial Corporation

Education:

Iowa State University, BS in Business, Journalism and Speech with Emphasis in Advertising Sales.

Member, Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority, Communications Club, Dean’s List

On the move up:

“Prior to joining the Dial Corporation I was with Kraft Foods for 19 years. At Kraft, I held various leadership positions, most recently as VP Central Area, VP of USA Sales Planning and Strategy and Senior Director Oscar Mayer Division. At Kraft I held 15 different positions and moved nine times.” Highlights include: Progressive Grocer Top Women 2007, Kraft Foods National Circle of Excellence Award, Kraft Diversity Award, Kraft Leadership Ring Honors, Henkel/Dial Executive Leadership Member, Arizona Leadership Forum Presenter, GMA MSM Co-Lead for 2006 and 2007, Nomination to Vice Co-Chair for GMA 2008.

Humble beginnings:

“[My first job was] at McDonalds, working my way up in High School to Crew Chief Manager.”

The ‘Change Agent’:

“I have been blessed to be surrounded by great people. All the different positions, geographies and experiences gave me a comprehensive base of knowledge to equip me for executive leadership responsibilities. I am a visionary thinker with a strategic bent, but I have no patience for stopping there; if there isn't action that comes out of the great work, then all is for naught. I tend to be labeled a change agent because I am always curious about the next level of performance. I am never fully satisfied with where we are now and really look forward to the next journey. It is most important that you surround yourself with great people - there is NO WAY I could do any of this alone.”

On Partnership:

“We are all interconnected and reliant on each other in this industry. If you look at the people that have made the most impact, one of the common themes is that they embrace the collaboration of others and that they are open to new thinking. There isn't any one of us that is as strong as all of us together. I haven't yet met the person that has ‘it all figured out.’ Have you?”

Family First:

"I have three wonderful kids: Brittany-17 years old, Brandon-14 years old and Briana-13 years old. Terry, my husband, is an amazing Husband/Dad and my beagle Maggie is a best bud. Both Terry and I were raised in Illinois but we have moved 10 times with Kraft and Dial. We now live in Scottsdale, Arizona but have also lived in Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Utah, California – and moved back to Illinois three different times. My kids keep us hopping with baseball, cheer, football, Honors Society and club activities. Between work and family, I have little free time for a hobby, but probably my favorite is travel. I enjoy my work a lot, but being a Mom is the best job ever.”

Datebook

April 5 - 8

Information Systems/Logistics Distribution Conference

Miami, FL

Marriott Doral Golf Resort and Spa

Contact: Jennifer Finci

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