Walmart To Start Sharing Sales Data

(New York Post) - After decades of zealously guarding its sales data as top secret, Walmart, the world's biggest retailer, has begun to make it available -- most recently in a deal Friday with NPD Group, a New York State-based market-research firm.

The tie-up, which follows similar agreements last summer with the research firms Nielsen and IRI, will give NPD's clients -- which include most of Walmart's suppliers and competitors -- access to mountains of sales data on millions of products that Walmart has kept under wraps for years.

Walmart, headed by CEO Mike Duke, had long considered its data, which reveals the brands of toothpaste, paper towels and cell phones that are and are not selling, to be prized competitive information that gave it an advantage over rivals.

But the data lockup lately has backfired, according to critics.

Walmart's stubborn insistence on keeping its data secret, even as other chains shared theirs through groups like NPD, had an increasingly isolating effect on the company, Kurt Jetta, CEO of consumer research firm TABS Group, said.

"It got to the point where they were smoking their own exhaust," Jetta told the New York Post. "They didn't understand what was going on in the market."

That could help explain some of Walmart's gaffes in past years, critics said, including its failed bid to mimic Target's trendy fashions and an ill-advised inventory clampdown that reduced the number of brands it carried for thousands of products, from ketchup to kitchenware.

As news of Walmart's NPD deal rippled through its network of suppliers, some industry insiders said the change was long overdue.

"It's bad enough that they're stuck in Bentonville, [Ark.]," one New York-based supplier told the Post. "Their heads have also been stuck in the 1990s."

Walmart officials declined to respond to specific questions about the company's abrupt flip-flop. But the deal will give the retailer "deeper insights into what consumers are buying and what they are looking to buy," according to a statement by Cindy Davis, executive vice president of Walmart global customer insights.

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