Wal-Mart workers in the UK lose their bonus pay as company's results are disappointing

Wal-Mart's workers in the United Kingdom will not see any bonuses this year, as the company's British results have been disappointing. When Asda Wal-Mart reported on little more than 2 per cent growth of same store sales during the last weeks of 2005, market leader Tesco's comparable figures were close to 6 per cent, and Asda's closest competitor Sainsbury's over 5 per cent.

Still, Wal-Mart's British operation Asda is much more successful than the Bentonville retail giant has been in Germany. There, the company has kept losing hundreds of million of US dollars every year and does not seem to get its concept right. One of the reasons can be Wal-Mart's poor personnel policies against its German staff, who can defend their rights and jobs only because they are so well organised in their trade union ver.di.

In the United Kingdom, Wal-Mart has wisely kept much of Asda's profile intact instead of transforming the whole company into a 'real' Wal-Mart, as they have tried to do with poor success in Germany. Even so, Wal-Mart has not succeeded very well in challenging Tesco's leading market position.

The US retail giant's Bentonville-based American management got nervous enough last year to try to call for help from British competition authorities. This brought wry smiles from many European competitors, who knew that once again Wal-Mart shot itself in its own foot. One doubts whether even Asda's own managers in the UK thought that this was really smart. No other company is as vulnerable as the US multinational itself with its dominant global and US market position, not at least in its relations with producers and suppliers. This is the real direction where competition authorities should look.

Last year, 94 per cent of Asda's employees got to share a bonus amount of 19 million British Pounds, or well over 30 million US dollars.