Walmart stepping up its focus on private brands

During a conference call with analysts to discuss Walmart’s first-quarter results, Walmart’s Director of Investor Relations Kary Brunner said Walmart is stepping up its focus on private brands.

Brunner was asked what Walmart is doing to drive its private brand business.

“Wal-Mart has long been a house of national brands and it's important to our overall strategy as it’s easy to communicate your everyday low prices relative to the competition when you have national brands so that's important, but we have seen opportunity to increase the quality of our private brands and probably the most recent example is our introduction of new apparel brands,” Brunner said, according to a transcript released by Seeking Alpha. “We think there's an opportunity to gain extra share of wallet as a result of providing quality private brands so we are focused not only on quality in the grocery and non-grocery areas but also in the quality of price that we offer to the customer.”