Walmart CEO Doug McMillon to retire in January

Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon will retire early next year, after overseeing the transformation of the leading US retailer into an e-commerce giant. the company said Friday in a filing.

The former CEO will be replaced by John Furner, Walmart’s U.S. CEO, on Feb. 1, according to the filing.

McMillon, who took the top job at Walmart in February 2014, will officially retire effective Jan. 31. He will continue to serve as the company’s CEO and will be employed by Walmart as an advisor until January 31, 2027.

Furner, 51, has been CEO of Walmart’s U.S. business since 2019. In that role, he oversees more than 4,600 stores and the company’s largest sector. He joined the company in 1993 as an hourly associate.

The CEO transition announcement comes just six days before the retailer reports its quarterly earnings. Walmart shares are up 13% this year as of Thursday’s close, as the company grows its digital business and wins over more high-income shoppers.

For more than a decade, McMillon, 59, has led the retail giant and overseen the company’s growth as an e-commerce leader. He also oversaw the business during a tumultuous time marked by the Covid pandemic, supply chain disruptions, high inflation and tariff changes.

During his time at the helm of the company, Walmart shares have risen more than 300%. The company’s shares closed Friday at $102.48, roughly stable.

McMillon and Furner have had similar paths to the top job at Walmart. Both have spent nearly three decades at Walmart. Both started as hourly associates and rose through the ranks at the retail giant, serving in merchandising and operations roles. Both also served as CEOs of their warehouse club, Sam’s Club.

In a statement, Walmart President Greg Penner described Furner as “the right leader to guide Walmart into the next chapter of our growth and transformation.”

“Having started as an hourly associate and been with us for more than 30 years in a variety of leadership roles across our three operating segments, John understands every dimension of our business, from the sales floor to global strategy,” added Penner.

“Serving as CEO of Walmart has been a great honor and I am grateful to our board of directors and the Walton family for the opportunity,” McMillon said in a statement.

He said Furner’s “curiosity and digital acumen, combined with a deep commitment to our people and our culture, will allow him to take us to the next level.”

Together with Walmart, the great competitor Aim is also set to have a new leader in early 2026. Target announced last month that Michael Fiddelke, chief operating officer and former chief financial officer, will succeed longtime Target CEO Brian Cornell on Feb. 1.

As Walmart’s leader, McMillon played a key role in turning the nation’s largest grocer into an e-commerce giant and positioning the company to sell more ads and more discretionary merchandise, along with dozens of eggs and gallons of milk.

During his first years as CEO, McMillon greenlit the $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet.com in 2016, an e-commerce startup that Walmart hoped would drive digital growth and give it credibility as it tried to fight Amazon’s meteoric rise.

The startup’s acquisition, particularly its hefty price tag, sparked debates in retail circles about whether the retail giant had overpaid for the asset and whether such a move was necessary to help Walmart navigate a difficult entry into the world of e-commerce. However, the deal gained digitally savvy Walmart talent, notably Jet.com founder and serial entrepreneur Marc Lore, who had sold his previous company, Quidsi, the parent of Diapers.com, to Amazon and worked for Amazon for years.

During Lore’s years leading Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce business, Walmart bought digital-native businesses, including men’s clothing company Bonobos, and gave birth to other internal concepts, such as the Allswell mattress brand. Walmart later sold Bonobos and other digital businesses, and closed Jet.com in 2020.

Although the deal with Jet.com fell short of the expectations of some Wall Street investors, McMillon, in a call with analysts at the time, credited the acquisition with “driving the progress we’ve made over the last several years” in digital growth and curbside pickup and delivery.

For the past five years, Walmart has leaned on its membership program, Walmart+, and its third-party marketplace as it tries to fend off Amazon’s e-commerce dominance. It launched Walmart+, its own subscription service and answer to Amazon Prime, in 2020 and has continued to add benefits such as streaming through Paramount+.

Through its third-party marketplace, it has increased its product offering on virtual shelves by relying on independent sellers to offer its customers a wider range of clothing, beauty brands and even luxury bags. The model, which mirrored Amazon’s approach, also allowed Walmart to make money in new ways, such as selling ads and fulfillment services to sellers.

A CNBC investigation earlier this year found that Walmart’s marketplace boom occurred because it made it easier than Amazon for sellers to join the platform over time. CNBC discovered at least 43 vendors who had taken on another company’s identity to sell on Walmart’s marketplace, and some of those accounts offered counterfeit beauty products.

Elsewhere in the company, McMillon also revolutionized Walmart’s pay structure for its hundreds of thousands of employees, announcing in 2015 that the company would give half a million hourly employees a raise and raise wages to $9 an hour, a move that faced harsh criticism on Wall Street at the time.

In more recent years, Walmart has increased wages several times more. But it has faced persistent criticism from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and other politicians who have argued that the company has not shared enough of its profits with hourly employees through salaries and benefits.

As the country’s largest private employer, Walmart has also been closely watched as the rise of artificial intelligence drives changes in the workforce and could threaten employment.

McMillon recently said that AI is “going to literally change every job.”

In a statement, McMillon referred to the growth of AI as a new dynamic facing his successor. And, he said, Furner is “uniquely capable of leading the company through this next AI-driven transformation.”