By Anthony Harrup


MEXICO CITY--Mexico's largest retailer, Wal-Mart de Mexico SAB, posted a 5.2% rise in fourth-quarter profit on higher sales and operating gains.

Walmex, a unit of Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart Inc., reported profit of 13.25 billion Mexican pesos ($653 million) for the October-December period, compared with 12.6 billion pesos in the year-earlier quarter.

Sales increased 9.5% to 214.57 billion pesos, with same-store sales up 7.8% in Mexico and 10.9% in Central America.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a measure of operating cash flow, rose 5.4% to 23.56 billion pesos.

In Mexico, the strongest sales growth was at Sam's Club membership stores, followed by the no-frills Bodega stores. Walmex continued switching its high-end Superama stores to the Walmart Express format with 75 conversions last year. Sales in that format were soft in the quarter, which the company attributed to remodeling work under way.

But "we see that stores that were converted to the Walmart Express format during the first half of the year are showing a positive trend, and even surpassing the level of sales they had before the conversion, which is encouraging," Chief Executive Guilherme Loureiro said in webcast presentation.

Walmex opened 131 new stores last year, including 122 in Mexico, nearly twice as many as in 2020 when construction was slowed by the pandemic. New stores contributed 1.3 percentage points to 2021 sales growth.


Write to Anthony Harrup at anthony.harrup@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

02-16-22 1811ET