How Christina Zhu turned Sam’s Club into Walmart’s unlikely growth engine in China

Christina Zhu, the head of Walmart’s China business, remembers when Chinese shoppers did not have much choice.

As a child, she watched her parents wake up at 4:30 a.m. on Sundays to go to the wet market. “They had to haggle, and high-quality produce wasn’t always guaranteed,” Zhu, born in 1973, recalled at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau in September.

Today, Chinese shoppers are “probably the group with the most choices [in the world],” and they have become “the most demanding customers,” she said.

Meeting those rising expectations has become the defining challenge for retailers in China, and Walmart has managed it better than most. It entered China in 1996 with a Supercenter and a Sam’s Club in Shenzhen. Three decades later, the U.S. retailer is thriving in the world’s second-largest economy even as other foreign brands struggle.

China represents 3% of Walmart’s overall business, but it is growing, generating $24.6 billion in sales in its past fiscal year, a 19.3% jump. Sales grew 20.7% last quarter, faster than the 5.9% reported by the company as a whole.

Those figures are even more impressive given China’s ongoing consumption slump. Consumer-goods retail sales in China grew 1.1% in the first eight months of the year, compared with 4.6% growth over the same period in 2025, and just 0.4% year over year in August. High unemployment and a real-estate crisis are weighing on spending.

“Sam’s Club is positioned very clearly: We serve upper-middle-class families in Chinese cities. We think of ourselves less as a retailer, less as a channel, [but as] buying agents for members.”Christina Zhu

“Sam’s Club is positioned very clearly: We serve........

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