Walmart China grew 20.7% while Starbucks, Lululemon stumbled. CEO: 'My boss is the Chinese customer.'

Walmart China's 20.7% same-quarter sales growth, a figure disclosed at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on September 8, is the direct payoff of a strategy fewer Western retailers have mastered in China: refuse to apply a global playbook and instead treat the Chinese customer as the only authority. That line comes from Christina Zhu, Walmart China's president and CEO, who said, 'I only have one boss, and my boss is the Chinese customer.' The contrast with her global peers is sharp. Starbucks and Lululemon have struggled in China, while Walmart keeps widening its lead, opening more than ten new stores across the country in the past year alone. Zhu's comment isn't a slogan; it's the operating logic behind an omnichannel model where today more than half of Walmart China's sales revenue comes from online purchases, a complete reversal of the brick-and-mortar retail model Walmart initially introduced in Shenzhen in 1996, five years before China joined the World Trade Organization.