Walmart would likely see some impact from tariffs President Donald Trump is seeking to impose, especially if ones threatened against Canada and Mexico are implemented, the retailer said Thursday.
The big-box giant reported quarterly earnings and also signaled slowing profit growth. Its shares fell about 6% amid a broader market decline Thursday morning.
In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said that while some two-thirds of Walmart's products are sourced from the U.S., the company was “not going to be completely immune” from trade duties.
“We’ve lived in a tariff environment for the last seven or eight years, and we’ll do what we know how to do,” he said. “We’ll work with suppliers. We’ll lean into our private brand. We’ll shift supply where necessary to try to take advantage of lower costs that we can then pass on to consumers.”
Since Walmart is not sure if the tariffs will take effect next month, the company did not factor them into its guidance, Rainey said.
While a given company must pay a tariff up front if it imports a good from an affected country, the firm is ultimately forced to decide how to mitigate on those costs — and they often get passed down to shoppers.
Rainey previously told CNBC that there would likely be cases where prices for consumers would increase as a result of tariffs, adding that they are "inflationary" for customers.
U.S. companies are seeing mounting queries about how they would be impacted by the levies Trump has called for. So far, only a supplemental 10% duty on Chinese goods has gone into effect, though the president has threatened a vast new array of tariffs depending on a given country's current trade posture with the U.S. Steel and aluminum tariffs are set to kick in next month, while Trump this week called for new tariffs on automobiles, drugs, semiconductors and lumber imported to the U.S.
CNBC has found the word "tariffs" has come up on more than 190 calls held by S&P 500 companies in 2025, putting it on track to see the highest share in half a decade. However, many, like Walmart, stated they were not yet figuring the effect of them into their official forward guidance and outlooks.
“We’ve game-planned out several scenarios and steps we could take depending on what actually goes into effect,” R. Scott Herren, the chief financial officer at the tech group Cisco, said in recent comments.
This week, the Federal Reserve indicated that discussion of tariffs had come up during its policy meetings, and had gone into its calculation for keeping interest rates elevated.
"Business contacts in a number of Districts had indicated that firms would attempt to pass on to consumers higher input costs arising from potential tariffs," the central bank reported — something that could threaten to accelerate inflation.
And in its “upside risks to the inflation outlook," it cited "the possible effects of potential changes in trade and immigration policy.“
