Walmex eCommerce Grew 16%. Its Marketplace Shrank Again.

Walmart de México y Centroamérica reported second quarter results on July 22. Mexico eCommerce net sales grew 16.2% against the same quarter last year and gross merchandise value grew 11.5%. The company attributed the gap between those two figures to Marketplace, where GMV declined 6.6%.

That was the second consecutive quarterly decline, and the smaller of the two. In the first quarter, Walmex reported Mexico Marketplace GMV down 14.4%. eCommerce accounted for 9.5% of Mexico’s total GMV in the second quarter, against 7.7% in the first, so the digital business kept taking share of Mexican volume while its third-party component contracted at less than half the earlier rate.

The growth came from delivery. On-demand GMV rose 21.1% in the quarter, up from 19.5% in the first, operating from roughly 1,490 on-demand stores across more than 520 cities with household reach of about 82%. In Central America, where the base is far smaller, eCommerce GMV grew 23.7%.

Walmex Traced The Decline To Sellers, Not Shoppers

The company addressed the cause in April rather than leaving it to inference. Prathibha Rajashekhar, Senior Vice President of Sam’s Club, told the first quarter webcast audience that the Marketplace reduction was driven primarily by problems affecting key electronics sellers, and that Walmex was working on those problems in collaboration with Walmart Inc.

President and CEO Cristian Barrientos Pozo described the response in the same webcast as “an aggressive plan to leapfrog performance in conjunction with Walmart Inc.” He named three components: a stronger customer proposition built on extended catalog and speed, a stronger seller proposition built on faster onboarding, and use of Walmart’s global marketplace footprint for cross-border selling. He called eCommerce the company’s top priority for acceleration and restated a goal of tripling the eCommerce business over five years.

Sellers outside Mexico should read the cross-border component as the one that concerns them. A marketplace whose contraction traces to specific sellers rather than to demand, and whose stated remedy pairs faster onboarding with the parent company’s global footprint and a wider catalog, is a marketplace working to broaden its base. Walmex has now put that on the record twice, and the second quarter figures show the underlying decline closing rather than widening.

Walmex Is Fixing Marketplace Inside A Slowing Business

The quarter around eCommerce was soft. Consolidated revenue rose 1.9% to 250.9 billion pesos, with Mexico up 3.1% and Central America up 3.6% on a constant currency basis. Gross margin contracted 10 basis points to 24.0%, which the company tied mainly to price investments in Central America. Operating income fell 1.4% to a 6.8% margin, EBITDA rose 0.6%, and net income declined 0.7%. Barrientos opened the release by noting that “consumption is still soft” while pointing to disciplined execution against the company’s three business priorities.

For third-party sellers the read is concrete. Walmart Mexico’s Marketplace is contracting, the contraction is narrowing sharply, the company has attributed it to seller-side problems rather than to consumer demand, and it has named cross-border expansion as part of the correction. Anyone weighing Mexico as an expansion channel now has both the risk and the invitation on the record from the same source. For first-party suppliers the read is indirect and points at fulfillment, since the volume Walmex is adding arrives through on-demand stores and last mile delivery rather than through third-party listings.

Walmex holds its live question and answer session on July 23 at 6:30 a.m. Mexico City time and reports third quarter results on October 27. The line worth watching is not the headline GMV figure but the Marketplace component inside it, because a third consecutive narrowing would be the first evidence that the seller base is actually widening.

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