Cindy Davis

For more than a decade, there's been a sizeable gap in analyses of the retail and consumer goods industries because Walmart did not make its sales data available to third-party firms. Now that the world's largest retailer will begin sharing information from its Walmart and Sam's Club stores with analytics firm Nielsen, that gap will shrink dramatically. While Walmart does share data with many of its consumer goods suppliers, the retailer had stayed out of the prevailing retail/consumer goods data sharing model for over 10 years. Because Walmart can account for one-third to one-half of a consumer product's market