17-16. The global recession slowed down Tesco’s plans for expansion. Why might Tesco have been more harmed by the recession than Walmart? It’s no secret that Walmart is the largest retailer (indeed, the second-largest corporation) on the planet, with total revenues in 2012 of $469 billion. It’s more than six times bigger than the number-two retailer in the United States, Home Depot (2012 revenue: $75 billion), and it’s bigger than Europe’s three largest retailers—France’s Carrefour, Britain’s Tesco, and Germany’s Metro AG—combined. It is, according to the business-information service Hoover’s,

“an irresistible (or at least unavoidable) retail force that has yet to meet any immovable objects.” One key to Walmart’s success has been astute supply chain management. For example, Walmart was among the first to use point-of-sale scanners to track product sales and reorder quickly to meet shifting consumer buying patterns. And Walmart has also been ruthless at forcing its suppliers to continuously lower their own costs.

But some experts have recently noted that Walmart is actually getting beaten at its own game by one of its European rivals, Tesco. Food-retail analyst Kevin Coupe points out that “there isn’t a place in the world where Tesco has gone one-on-one with Walmart and Tesco hasn’t won.”

In Britain, for example, U.K.-owned Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer, commands a 34-percent market share—

double that of Walmart-owned Asda.