"If Walmart Is Under Pressure to Raise Prices, It's Going to Have Broader Effects on the Economy."

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Tim Beyers and host Ricky Mulvey discuss:

• Walmart's response to tariff uncertainty.
• Netflix's booming ad business.
• How YouTube is capitalizing on points of "maximum attention."

Then, Motley Fool analyst Karl Thiel joins host Mary Long to dive into the executive order on prescription drug prices and questions for pharmaceutical companies.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on May 15, 2025.

Ricky Mulvey: Walmart is trying to hold the line. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

I'm Ricky Mulvey. Joined today over the Internet by Tim Beyers. Tim, good to see you.

Tim Beyers: Good to see you too, Ricky.

Ricky Mulvey: Where's the caffeination level usually come in with that?

Tim Beyers: Oh, I'm well caffeinated, ready to go.

Ricky Mulvey: So caffeinated he forgot that he was caffeinated. Anyway, the nation's largest private employer reported this morning, that's Walmart. A few notable business results, talking about their e-commerce business, overall same store sales. But the big story here, Tim, is tariffs. Chief Financial Officer, John David Rainey, went on CNBC and said, "We're wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb." Walmart's a pretty big retailer. The market right now says, we're seemingly at the end of this tariff story. The CFO of Walmart says we're not. Listeners may be sick of hearing about this tariff story, but what does this all mean for investors?

Tim Beyers: It is nowhere near over, nowhere near it. David Rainey is right. Walmart is a proxy for the wider economy, and if Walmart is under pressure to raise prices, it's going to have broader effects on the economy. We know this. It's going to hit across the US. Remember here, the tariff war with China, Ricky is only on pause. It's on pause, so it could very well resume 90 days from now. That would have dramatic and very consequential and unpleasant effects on the US economy. The level of uncertainty tied to tariffs and American economic policy just hasn't gone away, and Rainey is making that point. He's right to do so because of just the way that we think of Walmart as proximate of the American economy.

Ricky Mulvey: I appreciate it in the earnings call, this was CEO Doug McMillon basically saying we're not going to raise prices across food to make up for the loss on some finished goods because we have a responsibility to provide food to Americans cheaply. However, when you think of products like bananas and coffee, that's not grown in the United States, and folks might see some increases in the coming months. One notable story here is the e-commerce business for Walmart. Business rose 22% on the year and it was the first quarter of profitability. This is notable to me, Tim, because this is the second biggest e-commerce business in the US behind Amazon. Even for a giant, it's really hard to make a profit, even for Walmart, which is a pretty darn efficient company. I'll pose it to you. Why is it so tough to make a profit selling things on the Internet, even for a giant like Walmart?

Tim Beyers: Because it's incredibly difficult to differentiate on the Internet. Walmart sells a lot of everyday common goods. Thankfully, Walmart does have a brand advantage that extends into its e-commerce business so e-commerce is just another distribution channel for Walmart. But we think of them as everyday low prices and everything. It's really an everything store, that's a lot like Amazon. I often think of Walmart as Amazon but cheaper. A lot of things that I can get at Walmart are a little bit cheaper. The last few quarters have seen tailwinds for this company, including in the e-commerce channel. That's because prices have been and continue to be high around the country so Walmart has provided shoppers with some amount of relief here, particularly in grocery. I think we've seen this a lot in recent quarters from Walmart. It's less clear whether this company can keep providing relief, though, and that speaks to the comments that the CFO, Rainey, made above. But we should continue to think of it this way, Ricky. Walmart is not the kind of company that sells something so unique that it can make margin on the uniqueness of what flows through the distribution channel. They have to make money by getting really efficient, really smart, and price really well in the distribution channels where they operate, and that includes e-commerce.

Ricky Mulvey: Well, goods at Walmart can be cheap. The stock is pretty expensive. Is a rule breaker, Tim, you think about the snap test. What happens if Thanos snapped his fingers and made this company disappear? Walmart absolutely passes this. Millions of people would feel an immense amount of pain if Walmart were to suddenly go away. But right now, it's also trading at a historically high valuation, and part of that is the uncertainty we talked about earlier. You're seeing investors rush to safety. The stock is now at 60 times free cash flow. Historically, it's about half of that. When you look at the enterprise value to revenue, which is we take all the equity and debt and divide it by the revenue, it's up by more than half from one year ago, up by more than 50%. If you're holding a defensive, maybe a cyclical stock like this, if you're an investor, should you be sweating this a little bit?

Tim Beyers: I think we can fairly say that Walmart has been performing exceptionally well and has earned the premium for which it trades, so not sweating immediately. Having said that I do think this is a premium valuation. But again, let's go to the numbers. If we look at the most recent quarter, US store level comps, so same store sales, up 4.5%, that is extraordinary. When you consider the scale of Walmart's network, the number of stores that are operating in the US, 4.5% systemwide is immense. Having said that, Walmart does trade for 1.2 times revenue and a 1.4% free cash flow yield. To put that in perspective, Ricky, we're talking about the market expecting Walmart to deliver higher than average free cash flow growth. This goes to your 60X multiple as well for several years into the future, much higher than average. That may not be achievable, given what Rainey said about tariffs and the wider economic impact that Walmart is facing. They may not be able to pull that off. This remains a really good business, but I think today's buyers of Walmart might be prepared to hold for a decade or longer, collect your dividends as cash and then reinvest when multiples get closer to their historic levels. This is not the kind of business that I would be inclined to sell, but I might be just more careful with it, Ricky, especially if I was adding, I'd be buying in smaller amounts, prepared to hold for a really long time, and I might not automatically reinvest the dividends. I might just harvest the cash and wait for some better prices to add shares.

Ricky Mulvey: A moderated response from the caffeinated man.. You got to give Walmart some credit, really growing its e-commerce business and also 50% increase in its ads business. So it is getting higher margin dollars through the door that the bulls deserve some credit for. Let's move on to up fronts, big ad discussion here. Up fronts is when now streamers, traditionally, it was just TV networks, but now CBS isn't even there, they go to advertising buyers and say, this is what you can sell ads on. These are our shows, these are the live sports coming up. Netflix was there with a fairly small crowd. I think it was about 500 people there. But to me, the big headline from Netflix's presentation, Tim, is that the ad supported tier has 94 million monthly active users. That's grown by more than 20 million people since November. To put this into context, the ad tier of Netflix reaches more 18-34 year-olds than any US broadcast or cable network. I am surprised that that is not ESPN. Netflix ad tier beating ESPN. Is that surprising to you?

Tim Beyers: Not even a little bit. That may be because I have been being watching Netflix for a show that makes me feel 15 again, which would be Cobra Kai. I love everything about this show and the nostalgic feels I'm getting from it. I'm biased toward that show, but I think its success reflects something important that Netflix has quite a lot of family friendly, kid-friendly, popcorn worthy programming that pulls in younger adults. I don't think you're wrong. I do think that ESPN as an appeal for that 18-34 demo is absolutely right, but I also think that Netflix is well suited to that similar demo. That's why I'm not surprised by it. Again, they have a very long tail content strategy, so lots of programming to suit any taste, which also makes them suitable for a lot of different demographics. There's just room to penetrate really across the age spectrum. So yeah, not surprised by the 18-34 numbers there for Netflix.

Ricky Mulvey: Are you on the Drive to Survive train? Are you watching that?

Tim Beyers: I am not. To be fair, I have been completely sucked in by Cobra Kai because 1984 and the Karate Kid, I was 15-years-old, I was completely sucked in by that. I still get chills with the Joe Bean Esposito. You're the best around. Great stuff man. I cannot get enough of that.

Ricky Mulvey: Well, maybe Netflix will be able to serve you up an AI-based ad based on your love of that Cobra Kai show because Netflix also unveiling how they're thinking about ads into the future. The basic promise is that we have this fabulous algorithm that can recommend shows to people based on their viewing habits, what they're tuning into, what they're not watching, and we can use that same tool for your ad buying experience. That part seems like a winner to me. If I were buying ads, I'd love to hear that. The part that sounds a little scarier to me is this offer of shoppable mid roles in AI-driven dynamic product placement inside of hit shows like Squid Game. If you want your product to appear in a show like Squid Game, we will make it appear, not even regardless of what happens to the story, we will simply make that appear. Tim, that part sounds a little scary to me.

Tim Beyers: You hope that your product does not appear right after the murder scene, but maybe, I guess, if you have murder equipment, maybe you do want that. Hopefully, you're not selling murder equipment on Netflix. Now, more important than the AI tools, I think, is the vastness and variety of the content library. I doubt that the AI is going to immediately have margin impact. I think scale is what matters for Netflix here. You want more content that has appeal to advertisers here. If this continues, scale does mean there will be big winners and big losers and Netflix get to price it's ad inventory according to the perceived value of the viewer. Like you mentioned Squid Game, the ad rate for Squid Game is going to be high. There's going to be a premium for that. If you are talking about a lower tier show, then obviously the ad rate is going to be much lower. So there's a variable margin that Netflix, they can flex here. To me, that's the important part. They probably have a lot more pricing power built into that ad tier than we give them credit for, and I don't think that really has much to do with the AI.

Ricky Mulvey: For advertisers, consider Squid Game as a show that is about how money makes people do awful and terrible things, it all scales up the wealth ladder. But you know what? If we can sell within it, we're going to sell within it. When you look at Netflix, overall, this is one that analysts are very rosy about. You think about the future growth levers, it seems like ads would be the most important. If you're an investor in Netflix, is this the most important thing you should be paying attention to right now?

Tim Beyers: I do think so. I certainly think that the expansion of the advertising tier, especially worldwide, is the most important thing. Having said that, operating margin is going to be an area to watch because the operating margin expansion has been on the menu for Netflix for a while now. I would be watching for it coinciding with revenue growth in overseas territories. If we get expanding operating margin plus big growth in non-US non-Canadian territories, I think we're really onto something here, because those two together signal pricing power in emerging markets, which is really hard to get. If they do end up getting that, it would be a very good sign for the long term health of the business. To be fair, remember, it wasn't that long ago that Netflix management said, we think we can triple this business within a few years, and this would be one of the ways you do that.

Ricky Mulvey: Let's wrap up with YouTube. To be honest, I'm annoyed that you wanted to talk about Alphabet in YouTube today because I would like to buy some Alphabet stock when I am permitted to. But because you're on the show today, because we're friends, Tim, I will talk about Alphabet only for you. I want you to know that this is just for you, not the listener. YouTube presented at the up fronts, and you wrote about this on the Motley Fool Live blog, which members can find on their homepage. I highly recommend you check that out. It's a great place to get analyst insights in what's going on in the market. You wrote about this. YouTube's strategy seems to be we're going QVC with more products placement, and also we're going to get really good at placing ads at cliffhangers in various videos.

Tim Beyers: It might be a little bit annoying, but I'm just going to say here, this is payback time, son. Given how many times you've had me talk about toast when I was trying to buy shares, this is absolutely justice. You're right about this. YouTube believes there is value to advertisers in placing ads at points of maximum attention on the programming being broadcast. Like you said, viewers are locked in, it's near a cliffhanger a moment in the programming, and then, boom, we're just going to hit you with an ad right at that moment when you are glued in to the next moment. Would that be annoying? Yes, I think it would be annoying. Will it be the kind of thing that will drive up ad prices? That's a maybe. There is a logic to it. But more importantly, this is the thing that allows YouTube to price ad space at a premium, which they do need to do.

Ricky Mulvey: YouTube is the dominant streamer for viewing hours. Now, it's a tough comp because you don't have to pay to watch YouTube, you just have to watch ads. It's interesting to see where it fits in to Alphabet's business model because, this was according to analysis from that Matt Belloni at Puck did with Allen Company, found that last quarter, basically, YouTube did 1.3 billion in operating profit, and that's also to Netflix's 3.3 billion, so Netflix making more profit, YouTube makes more money, and a lot of that, Tim, is because YouTube actually pays more money to creators than Netflix does to the professionals making their shows. But when we're talking about the just ad strategy for YouTube's business, how meaningful is this for Alphabet as a whole, as a two-trillion-dollar company?

Tim Beyers: It might be very meaningful in this way because it could prove to be the thing that disconnects YouTube from a reliance on search. If you have, for example, these peak points ads where you have a cliff hanger, and then you come in and you insert an ad right at the moment of maximum attention, that does not rely on a search term. That does not necessarily rely on a keyword. That is relying on the underlying program. If YouTube figures this out and gets better at selling premium advertising disconnected from the parent ad business, it adds a creative value that would allow YouTube to stand on its own. Which might be very important, Ricky, because it may be that regulators decide that YouTube must be on its own, so Alphabet has to be split up. We don't know yet, but I like that they are experimenting with ad formats and ad tools that are disconnected from search. That's probably a good thing.

Ricky Mulvey: We'll leave it there. Tim Beyers, appreciate your time and your insight. Thanks for being here.

Tim Beyers: Thanks, Ricky.

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Right, up next, Motley Fool senior analyst Karl Thiel joins my colleague Mary Long to break down the prescription drug pricing executive order and the questions that big drug makers are facing.

Mary Long: A prescription for a weight loss drug will cost you about $1,000 per month more in the US than it will in Europe. During a press conference earlier this week, President Trump rolled out an executive order that attempts to bring that price down to the lowest level across developed countries. In other words, this order calls for drug companies to treat the US as their most favored nation when it comes to drug pricing. I had a whole lot of questions when I was learning about this and hearing about this earlier this week. So I called up somebody who I thought would have some answers for me. That's Motley Fool analyst Karl Thiel. Karl, thanks for coming to us with all the answers on this very tricky, complex topic.

Karl Thiel: I am very glad to do it.

Mary Long: We'll start you off with what's obviously a very easy question. How exactly does international drug pricing work? Trump, he said in this press conference that the US is subsidizing other countries' drugs. How, what's the basis of that?

Karl Thiel: That's a great launching point because I do think it's actually pretty incontrovertible that the US is subsidizing other countries' drug prices. Looking at it broadly, there are essentially three pharma markets in the world. There's the US, there's Europe, and there's Asia. Even though the US represents about 4% of global population, it's about 43% of all global pharma sales. It's even higher percentage of profits. Europe is twice the size and only 23% of sales, and Asia is obviously a much higher part of the population is only 21% of sales. The thing is, drugs here cost somewhere on the order of two to four times what they do in Europe. In China, prices can run something like 10 times. The way that it's evolved over the years is that the US is essentially the profit center for global drug sales, and a lot of the rest of the world is important, but is gravy to companies. They're really coming here to make most of their money. A lot of that just has to do with the kind of healthcare systems that we have. A lot of Europe has single payer systems or multiplayer systems that are nevertheless government run. They're just working on a very different status quo than we are.

Mary Long: You talk about the healthcare system. As I'm listening to this press conference and trying to wrap my head around this executive order, one of the things that comes to my mind is that, wait, hold on, aren't there these players, these middlemen called PBMs, pharmacy benefits managers, and they negotiate the drug prices that we pay? How do these lesser known characters, the PBMs, actually fit into this picture of drug pricing and how does that system differ from the single payer or in some cases, multipayer system that you see predominantly in Europe?

Karl Thiel: This is unique to the United States that you have this extra layer called pharmacy benefit managers or PBMs. One thing you've been hearing quite a while is that a lot of drug executives, big pharma executives who have themselves had a lot of negative press have been pointing the fingers at PBMs as the middlemen who are really responsible for high prices. Just Rob Davis, the CEO of Merck gave a rant about that in Merck's most recent call, but he's certainly not the only person to point it out. The reason it matters here is that the administration is concerned that targeting drug companies alone won't work. Let's say that most favored nation pricing actually works, which is a pretty big if, as I think we'll talk about shortly. But if drug companies had to make the best of a bad situation, they would likely just preserve their high list prices and just offer bigger rebates. As understood right now, that would satisfy most favored nation pricing as long as net pricing comes down. What you would have is pharmacy benefit managers taking that spread between list price and rebated price and profiting off of that. Part of the idea is that you need to take a bite out of this part of the industry that's also adding costs to the end consumer.

Mary Long: Let's talk about how this most favored nation pricing would work in practice, at least with the knowledge that we have now because part of this press conference was effectively President Trump saying, and Robert F Kennedy will figure out the details here, we don't have maybe all the details, but in theory, how might this work? How can an executive order from an American president mandate the pricing power of individual companies, especially those that are headquartered and based overseas, not on American soil.

Karl Thiel: That's the multibillion dollar question. It can't is the short answer. I will say that a lot of what people are talking about when they talk about this proposal right now is not what just got announced because that's fairly short on details. It's going back and assuming that the attempt to do this during the first Trump administration back in 2020, that this will largely be a repeat of that. When people are going into details, what they're really often doing is pulling up the details of the 2020 proposal and assuming that it's similar to that. But what's different this time around is that it's actually much broader. That proposal was really aiming at companies selling into government programs, so Medicare or Medicaid. This is aimed at companies selling drugs in the private market, so private companies selling drugs in the private market. To do that, there is no enforcement mechanism, which is why it's basically right now just a request that companies lower prices, along with a series of threats. In order to actually make a system that work, you'd have to pass new laws. That means you need the cooperation of Congress, and it means that you need to pass muster with the courts. Neither of these things are guaranteed, and in fact, the first most favored nation proposal back in 2020 was shut down by the courts pretty quickly. So yeah, this would be a long time in the making.

Mary Long: Let's just play the theoretical game, and I understand that it's a theoretical game so I'm asking you to crystalball a little bit here. But should this actually go forward, is there a way to redistribute the profits that pharmaceutical companies are already seeing and still have American customers pay less, or is it just an inevitability that, hey, if this actually moves forward, has some teeth, it is an inevitability that pharmaceutical companies will lose some of the profits that they've come to expect?

Karl Thiel: If it moves forward the way as envisioned, then certainly companies would see their profits go down. That would be pretty hard to get away from. Ultimately, what you'd like to do and what President Trump even made some comments about is that the real goal would be to have prices go up in Europe as they come down here so that in the end, the profit picture isn't all that changed for drug companies. However, there's no real mechanism to make prices go up in Europe. I do think it would be a good thing if Europe was to shoulder a little bit more of the cost of innovation that the entire world benefits from, ultimately, from companies. But there's just no clear mechanism in this to make that work. If it were to happen at all, it would have to be a starve the beast kind of game where you drive profits down so badly that you make innovation go away and you slowly put pressure on Europe to bring some of their compensation up. But that's something that would probably play out over decades, if at all.

Mary Long: Pharmaceutical companies are one thing, but there are other healthcare companies that I can see potentially being affected by changes in this industry moving forward. There were a lot of fascinating quotes from this press conference. One that stuck out in my mind was Trump's promise to get rid of the middlemen. Again, that's PBMs, largely. United Healthcare, CVS, they both operate PBM businesses. They're vertically integrated healthcare companies. Does that insulate them at all from this promise to get rid of the middlemen in drug pricing, or does it leave them actually more vulnerable to this changing landscape?

Karl Thiel: If the goal is really to go after PBMs, then there's no way that that insulates them because it is an oligopoly, basically. United Healthcare runs OptumRx, CVS has Caremark, and Cigna has Express Scripts. That's like 80% of the PBM market right there. If you're going to deal with PBMs, you're going to deal with these companies. They're not insulated from it. A big part of the reason that there's this focus on PBMs is because of the way the industry has evolved. What will happen is a company will set a list price. That's seldom the price that an insurer or anybody else is actually going to pay. What happens is that companies set a list price, and then they negotiate rebates with these PBMs, and the bigger the rebate, the bigger the profit for the PBMs is. They take a part of that rebate for themselves. So there's incentive to have a system with really high list prices and really big rebates. You see this become sort of incredibly counterintuitive. There was a case when a biosimilar to Humira was launched back in 2023, and there were two versions of it launched by Amgen. One was offered at a 5% discount to the Humira price, and one was offered at a 55% discount, and everybody took the 5% discounted one because that one came with huge rebates. That's the somewhat counterintuitive, I will say, incentives in this industry, and that's why there's a lot of focus on PBMs right now, and that's why a lot of drug company executives are pointing the finger in that direction. They're not wrong. That's not the whole picture, but that is part of it.

Mary Long: Karl Thiel, thank you so much for the insight and for helping to demystify this very complex industry and new executive order.

Karl Thiel: All right, thank you.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. A personal finance consent follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers, advertisements or sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Karl Thiel has positions in Alphabet. Mary Long has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Netflix. Tim Beyers has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Netflix. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Amgen, Merck, Netflix, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends CVS Health, Novo Nordisk, and UnitedHealth Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.