Consumers shop at a Walmart supermarket in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The US retail giant Walmart Inc, which has been engaged in the Chinese market for over 20 years, is also endeavoring to reinvent its supermarket chain to enable it to compete in the changing and competitive retail and e-commerce sectors. 

Its China branch launched three new joint initiatives with JD, an online marketplace, during the third quarter. A two-hour delivery service is now available on JD to consumers within three kilometers of more than 40 Walmart stores in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. 

Regarding China as an important source of global retail growth, the retailer said it is grabbing the opportunity to invest in e-commerce, home grocery delivery and curbside pickup, hence accelerating its multi-channel sales capabilities. 

In the Le Marche store, which French supermarket chain Carrefour and China's tech giant Tencent co-developed and opened in May in Shanghai, all items sold in the store bear a distinctive bar code that customers can scan and buy using WeChat, one of the most popular messaging, social media and mobile payment apps. 

The two sides inked strategic cooperation agreements earlier this year, covering the fields of big data, mobile payment, facial recognition and Tencent Cloud. 

The enormous potential of China's New Retail market has boosted the confidence of global retailers. The total retail sales of consumer goods reached 27.4 trillion yuan in the first three quarters of this year, a year-on-year increase 9.3 percent. 

"A new era has come and we are trying something we haven't done in the past 20 years," said Anna Pawlak-Kuliga, Ikea's China president.