Retail

Wal-Mart management gets a shake-up following Jet.com deal

Items sit on shelves as employees work inside the Jet.com Inc. fulfillment center on Cyber Monday in Kansas City, Kansas.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Wal-Mart's management team is getting a makeover.

Less than two months after the world's largest retailer completed its $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet.com, several of its digital executives are leaving the company.

Fernando Madeira, president and CEO of Walmart.com, and Dianne Mills, a senior vice president of human resources, are exiting the firm, a spokesman confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

Their roles will not be formally filled, as the team is reshaped following the acquisition.

Brent Beabout, who headed the retailer's digital supply chain, left the company a few weeks ago, the spokesman said. He will be replaced by Jet.com co-founder Nate Faust.

Wal-Mart's executive changes were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company had previously announced that Neil Ashe, president and CEO of global e-commerce, would leave the company in wake of the acquisition.

"It's a transitional time," Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Toporek told CNBC, saying many of the big structural pieces required for its e-commerce operations had already been put in place. As a result, the executives chose this time to depart the company, Toporek said.

There is no set departure date for Ashe, Madeira or Mills, who are still working on projects for Wal-Mart, Toporek said.

Wal-Mart's purchase of Jet.com was widely viewed as a means for the bricks-and-mortar behemoth to deepen its bench of digital talent. Key to that bench was founder Marc Lore, who prior to Jet was best known for co-founding Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com. That company was sold to Amazon in 2010.

Though Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon has said Jet and Wal-Mart will operate as separate brands, Wal-Mart will incorporate elements from Jet's site into its operations. He told CNBC in August that he was particularly impressed with Jet's pricing algorithm, which adjusts when consumers opt to buy in bulk or choose other cost-saving shipping options.

"If Wal-Mart were starting today and we were building an e-commerce business some of the things that Jet designed into their approach would have been things we would have thought of and we would have wanted to do, and they've just done it from scratch," McMillon told CNBC's "Squawk Box."

Toporek told CNBC on Wednesday that Jet's smart basket technology will be incorporated on Walmart.com, but there's no set timeline.

At Wal-Mart's annual meeting with investors last month, McMillon told analysts he was working hard to keep Lore away from Wal-Mart's "bureaucracy."

"If Marc can be Marc within this company, then great things are going to happen," he said.

Wal-Mart's digital sales growth accelerated in the fiscal second quarter, after more than a year of consecutive quarterly slowdowns.