Walmart CEO Doug McMillon to Retire, John Furner Named as Successor

The company named John Furner, chief of the company’s U.S. business, its next chief executive, starting Feb. 1.

Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, will step down on Jan. 31, completing a 12-year run that moved the company from a staid brick-and-mortar retailer to a formidable challenger to Amazon, making the big-box store the envy of many in the retail industry.

Mr. McMillon, 59, will retire in early 2026 but remain on the board through the next annual shareholders meeting, the company said Friday.

John Furner, 51, who has been president and chief executive of Walmart’s U.S. division, will become the new chief executive.

Like Mr. McMillon, Mr. Furner has worked at Walmart his entire career, beginning as an hourly worker. He is a native of Arkansas — where Walmart is based, in Bentonville — whose father also worked at the retailer.

“The stores today are quite a bit different than what I was doing,” Mr. Furner said last year on a call with reporters. “I did manage two Supercenters, but we didn’t have pickup and delivery. E-commerce was really not even in existence just yet in the United States.”

When Mr. Furner takes the reins in February, he will oversee one of the largest work forces in the United States and be responsible for navigating the company through an age of advancing artificial intelligence. He must also deal with tariffs that are pressuring the retailer’s global supply chains and a customer base that is facing a nationwide affordability crisis.

“John understands every dimension of our business — from the sales floor to global strategy,” Greg Penner, chairman of Walmart, said in a statement.

Mr. McMillon leaves Walmart in a strong position after years of work repositioning it as a formidable digital player and more competitive employer. During his run, annual revenue increased nearly $200 billion, to $681 billion.

“I can’t overstate how difficult it is to take a company with such a strong legacy and make it competitive in today’s environment, given the pace of change,” said Joanna Starek, who advises chief executives and boards as senior partner at RHR International, a leadership consulting firm. “So many retailers died because they couldn’t move from ‘We sell products in stores’ to ‘We sell everywhere.’”

Mr. McMillon has led Walmart for almost double the average time for a retail chief executive. His long tenure, Ms. Starek said, allowed him to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing retailers.

When Mr. McMillon became chief executive in 2014, Walmart faced the question of how it would survive in an industry increasingly dominated by Amazon.

Stagnant wages and persistent unemployment were also affecting Walmart’s sales, which were largely driven by lower-income shoppers. Organized-labor groups were pressuring the company to increase wages and improve working conditions.

Mr. McMillon addressed each of those issues through acquisitions and new benefits packages while also increasing the company’s sales, profits and market share. During his tenure, Walmart’s stock rose just over 300 percent, beating the S&P 500. Its market value rose $560 billion.

Walmart’s stock was flat during trading on Friday.

In 2016, Walmart bought Jet.com from the serial entrepreneur Marc Lore for $3.3 billion. It was the largest deal ever for an e-commerce company at the time, and helped Walmart build the infrastructure it needed to jump-start its nascent online business.

The purchase of a majority stake in Flipkart, an e-commerce company in 2018, allowed Walmart to better position itself against Amazon’s dominance and tap into an international market.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Walmart leaned further into digital offerings like curbside, in-store pickup and home delivery. It is using drone delivery in certain cities as well. .

Improving its relationship with its 2.1 million workers globally was also a focus for Mr. McMillon. The company has boosted wages as it sought to compete for talented employees, raising both its base salary for U.S. store managers and starting hourly wages for its store workers.

Perhaps the new 350-acre campus in Bentonville is the epitome of the company’s rebrand during Mr. McMillon’s run. The new headquarters contain a hotel, a food hall, an amphitheater, fitness and child care centers, and racks of e-bikes for workers to make their way from building to building. As the company has beefed up its digital infrastructure, it has sought to poach more tech workers from Silicon Valley firms.

Walmart has also started to win over a new type of customer who may go to its website for delivery of not just low-priced clothing, home goods and groceries but also items like the $4,000 Louis Vuitton bags it now sells. Over the past three years, Walmart has attracted more online and in-store shoppers who make more than $100,000 a year.

But Walmart’s past success does not promise future growth.

“The temptation within the organization is going to be to just keep doing what they were doing under McMillon’s leadership,” said Ryan Krause, a professor of management at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. “The problem is there are going to be new challenges that are already arising very fast that Walmart didn’t have to deal with over the last 15 years.”

For example, while Walmart under Mr. McMillon spent years repairing its relationship with workers, the role of A.I. in the retailer’s operations could complicate the dynamic, Mr. Krause said. Mr. McMillon said this year that every job would change because of A.I.

“That’s going to raise questions about just how beholden they should be to choices they made over the last 15 years that worked,” Mr. Krause said.

Those decisions will be left for Mr. Furner to figure out. He has run Walmart’s U.S. business and overseen its 4,600 stores since 2019. The business has posted consistent growth during his tenure, even as many other retailers struggled to adjust to the changing consumer landscape.

“He’s gone through the pandemic; he’s gone through supply chain challenges; he’s gone through the first six months of evolving tariff policy,” David Silverman, a retail analyst at Fitch Ratings, said of Mr. Furner.

Still, it’s never easy to step into a longtime chief executive’s shoes.

“If you’re beloved, if you’ve built a strong culture, if you been successful, the bar is higher,” Ms. Starek of RHR International said of Mr. Furner. “That’s always a challenge, and it’s nerve-racking for new C.E.O.s when they follow someone who’s been so successful.”

Kailyn Rhone contributed reporting.

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