Walmart’s Sam’s Club Says It Didn’t Deliberately Recall Products From China’s Xinjiang Region

The Sam’s Club subsidiary of Walmart Inc responded to the uproar caused in China by the recall of products from Xinjiang in its application and denied that it was a deliberate measure in a meeting with analysts, stating that it was “a misunderstanding”.

Chinese social media users and local media last week criticized Sam’s Club, a warehouse club for members only that offers products and services, for having withdrawn the products from its online stores in the country.

The Chinese anti-corruption agency accused the US retail group already Sam’s Club from “stupidity and myopia”For this matter.

A representative of Sam’s Club told local analysts in a call organized by a national securities firm last week that Chinese consumers could not find Xinjiang products because the app does not support product searches based on place names.

The call, the full recording of which was shared with Reuters by a participant, introduced the representative as the regional e-commerce leader of Sam’s Club, surnamed Zhang.

“This matter is a misunderstandingZhang said on the call. “We have not defended ourselves, because there is no reason to be afraid of things we have not doneZhang added. A second participant corroborated Zhang’s comments on the call, who also discussed Sam’s Club’s plans in China.

Walmart did not respond to a request for comment. Neither Walmart nor Sam’s Club have so far publicly commented on the backlash against them in China and Zhang did not comment on the situation at Walmart, which was also accused of recalling products from the western edge of China, both from its physical stores and from its app.

The controversy, which caused a wave of buyers of Sam’s Club in China they will cancel their subscriptions, shows the tightrope in which foreign companies move in China when they have to reconcile the geopolitical tensions between the West and China with the importance that this country has as a market and supply base.

Xinjiang has become a growing point of conflict between Western governments and China, as UN experts and human rights groups estimate that more than a million people, mainly Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities, have been detained in concentration camps.

China has rejected allegations of forced labor or any other abuse in Xinjiang, describing the camps as vocational training centers designed to combat extremism, and in late 2019 said that all people in the camps had “graduated.”