Walmart Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to Walmart's fourth quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll now turn the conference over to Steph Wissink, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Steph, you may begin.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone. We appreciate you joining us and your interest in Walmart. Joining me today from our home office in Bentonville are Walmart CEO Doug McMillan and CFO John David Rainey. Doug and John David will first share their views on the quarter, and then we'll open up the line for your questions. During the question and answer portion, we will be joined by our segment CEOs, John Ferner from Walmart US, Kath McClay from Walmart International, and Chris Nicholas from Sam's Club. For additional detail on our results, including highlights by segment, please see our earnings release and accompanying presentation on our website. We will make every effort to answer as many of your questions as we can in the hour we have scheduled for this call. As a courtesy to others, please limit yourself to one question. Today's call is being recorded and management may make forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the factors identified in our filings with the SEC. Please review our press release and accompanying slide presentation for a cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements, as well as our entire safe harbor and non-gap reconciliations on our website at stock.walmart.com. Doug, that concludes my intro. We're ready to begin.

Good morning and thanks for joining us. We finished the year with another quarter of strong results. Our associates are doing a great job serving our customers and members. For the quarter, we had sales growth of 5.2% and adjusted operating income was up 9.4% in constant currency. We continue to gain market share across countries and income levels. As with the first three quarters of the year, transaction counts and unit volumes were up across markets. As we look at our results for the quarter and the year, we're pleased to see, first, a healthy top line. We're strengthening our ability to serve people how they want to be served in the moment. That's what's driving our growth. Our prices are low and we're becoming more convenient. Customers are shopping with us more often and buying more items, including in general merchandise categories, which were up low single digits in Walmart US and Sam's US for the quarter. Second, we're growing profit faster than sales, and we have runway to scale our higher margin businesses like membership, marketplace, and advertising. We're mixing ourselves up while simultaneously investing in lower prices and associate wages. Third, we're able to improve ROI even as we invest higher levels of capital to take advantage of the opportunities we see to strengthen the company. All three segments of our business had a good year. I'm proud of our leaders and all of our associates. They earned it. They're learning, they're acting fast, and they're working hard. For the quarter and the year, we're pleased with our performance during the holiday seasons around the world. We performed well in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and in China, where Sam's Club just wrapped up a strong Lunar New Year. We also performed well in India, and I'd like to share the news that PhonePay, our fintech business, is making preparations for an IPO in India. Our PhonePay team has long aspired to be a public company, and we're excited to be taking these early steps. As a company, we drove a lot of volume during the holidays and ended with our inventory level in good shape, up 2.8%. As always, we're working hard to help bring down prices. In Walmart US last year, we had over 22,000 rollbacks. We're wired to help people save money and live better. The work we're doing to expand our assortment is another reason for our growth, as more customers are finding what they're looking for. In addition to low prices and a growing assortment to choose from, we're focused on delivery speed and accuracy. If I could change anything about how we're perceived today, it'd be that more people know about our breadth of assortment online and our increasing delivery speed. For Walmart US, we recently announced same-day pharmacy delivery, and the early response has been strong. Customers love being able to get a basket of items delivered to their door that includes fresh, frozen, general merchandise, and now pharmacy. And because we're so close to them, they can get it fast. Sam's Club recently launched a new shipping offer, including free same or next day delivery from the club. Members asked for it and a team delivered. Listening to our members and solving what they want is a big reason why Sam's was recently ranked number one in customer satisfaction for retailers in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index. Around the world, we're making great progress on delivering goods faster to customers and members. We're taking learnings from markets like China and quickly standing up fast delivery solutions in other markets. We continue to be excited about our investments in supply chain automation, and we'll share even more on that topic during our investor conference in April. These past few quarters, we've talked about how we're using AI. The progress we've made over the years with technology has put us in a position to leverage today's fast moving capabilities closer to real time. I'm very proud of Suresh, our tech team, and all our leaders for how they're leaning in to adapt quickly. Today, I'd like to share two more examples. The first is related to a new AI agent for our merchants called Wally. Wally's learning to help us get to the root cause of issues related to things like out-of-stocks or overstocks with more accuracy and speed. Second, for developers on our tech team, we now have new coding assistance and completion tools that are helping streamline deployments and deliver code faster with fewer bugs. Last year, these tools helped us save about 4 million developer hours. This year, we plan to make these tools available to all developers in North America and India. As we become more productive and reduce the amount of time we work on routine tasks, that gives us time to develop tools that help us grow the business and move faster. I love how we're changing how we think and work without changing who we are. I can see us getting faster. Earlier this year, we began opening some of our new home office buildings in Bentonville. We'll be transitioning to the new home office throughout the year. It's an exciting time. It's also a time to remember the special things about this company that we want to strengthen and perpetuate. Moving to a new location doesn't change who we are. Cultural characteristics like servant leadership, humility, and a sense of urgency remain critical. Operating with an everyday low-cost culture and mindset is as important as ever. We have a meaningful purpose of saving people money and helping them to live better. And we have a set of timeless values that shape our culture regardless of the address of our home office. Characteristics and beliefs like these drive our results and make us unique. I hope you'll come see our home office when you visit during our Associate and Shareholders Week in June and that you'll feel the momentum. We know who we are and we like where we're going. We feel like we're just getting started. Here's John David.