With Bait, the chain is entering the competitive territory of traditional telephone companies with low-cost offers and a range of extra digital services.
Walmart added 687 mobile customers per hour during the first quarter of the year.
It is a record figure that allowed them to add 1.5 million users between January and March 2024, ten times more than those attracted by the largest operator in the market, Telcel.
His mobile phone firm, BAIT (which represents the acronym of Bodega Aurrerá Internet and Telephony), began as a strategy to support clients during the pandemic to now be the axis of a digital ecosystem to which many extra anabolics were added. “We are the market player that has gained the most positive adhesion in recent months,” explains Beatriz Gómez, Chief Growth Officer at Walmart in Mexico and Central America.
She was one of those who started this business unit that is about to turn four years old.
“At the beginning of the pandemic we did a survey to find out what our customers needed and the need for connectivity was enormous. In 2020 we launched a plan with two months of free telephony, while the evolution of the crisis was being seen,” he adds.
To put it in context, Bait doubled its telephone users in the last year: it went from 7.5 to 13.3 million customers. At the end of 2023 – to compare with the latest competition data – it was already the fourth mobile operator behind Telcel (82.9 million), Telefónica (22.5 million) and AT&T México (21.8 million).
Bait is a mobile virtual operator (MNO) that, with meteoric growth, separated itself from the league of its competitors in the mobile market. retail such as OUI (from Grupo Salinas) or Megacable.
Traditional telcos have started raising their eyebrows when they see Bait, not only for its data package offerings but also for its customer lifecycle. While in the sector average an active account is considered one that has had traffic in the last three to six months, in the case of Bait the lifetime of a user is one year.
“This is a prerogative that each operator has, in accordance with its business strategy, according to what the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) points out. We are in favor of standardizing times and for all companies to have the same life cycle so that the metrics are comparable,” adds Nuñez.
And how do they manage to offer telephone packages, in some cases seven times cheaper than the competition? “I don’t know anyone who is fighting with their money. We operate thanks to Altán’s wholesale network and we have access to the same prices as the rest of the 100 operators that are in this network,” says the WalMart executive, “thanks to the fact that Altán has a purpose of digital inclusion, we can have such a competitive price. Then, each company decides how much margin they want for their service,” says the executive, who also launched a free megabytes plan for purchases in the chain’s stores.
There are factors that work in Walmart’s favor, such as the foot traffic that is around 5.5 million people a day in all its store formats in the country.
Also the synergy with other services that have added to the connectivity: its Cashi wallet, the reception of remittances, the e-commerce and more recently, digital health and education.
Walmart launched a health membership that includes care in its 526 offices, discounts on medicines and now telemedicine to be treated virtually by telephone. In 2023 they placed 1.2 million of these memberships and 400 thousand in the first quarter of the year alone. The next link in the digital economy is Walmart Education, an online training service that offers the possibility of completing high school online and acquiring skills for quick job placement.
“The new thing that we will launch thanks to telephony will be a digital connection program: with each customer’s telephone number we will be able to automatically credit their megabytes of data for their purchase, but also know what they consume and how they consume it, “It will allow us to have a digital relationship with customers and exponentially improve the shopping experience,” explains Beatriz Nuñez, who is carrying out Walmart’s only own telephone project in the world.
