Why the world’s biggest retailer struggles in Russia.

Wal-Mart unexpectedly replaced its CEO on Friday, but things are looking up for the number 1 retailer as chastened American consumers rethink about those aspirational brands they've loved so long. Last week, the company posted a whopping 10 percent jump in profits, just as Starbucks saw its same-store sales plummet 8 percent.

Besides cashing in on American consumer woes, in recent years much of Wal-Mart's growth has come from overseas; indeed, incoming CEO Mike Duke has been in charge of Wal-Mart's international operations. A decade ago, just 5 percent of its earnings came from abroad. Now, more than 40 percent of its stores are overseas. To be exact, they're in 14 other countries where more than 50 million weekly visitors provide the Arkansas retailer with nearly a quarter of its sales. Wal-Mart has had particular luck in Mexico, China (the source of much of Wal-Mart's goods), and Latin America. The company is expanding in the larger markets, with more than 300 stores doing brisk business in Brazil and its first store in India early next year.

The glaring omission here is, of course, that backward R in BRIC: Russia. For four years now, Wal-Mart has been actively—and secretly—scouting the Russian terrain, trying to find the best bucket to catch a sprinkling of petrodollars. But, after four years of jerking around Russian realtors, there are still no stores in sight. This summer, Wal-Mart announced that it had hired a German retail executive to head up Wal-Mart's emerging markets division, with a scouting office in Moscow. Aside from that, however, Wal-Mart is keeping mum. "We continue to study the market" was the mysterious comment from Richard Coyle, the company's senior director of international affairs.

Why the hesitation? Well, as you may have heard, Russia is a strange place, prone to unpredictable government intervention and hefty bribe-taking. And if you want to build in Moscow, where nearly all of Russia's new wealth is concentrated and spent, you'd better be prepared to pay. A lot. Unlike in California, skyrocketing prices there are no bubble.

So, let's say you're Wal-Mart, and you've managed to get a scrap of land. You'd quickly discover that there are all kinds of permits and papers needed to start building, but they're hard to get, so, well, you'd have to come to a special-and pricey-understanding with the permit granters. When IKEA set up shop in Moscow in 2004, for instance, it fought with city authorities for months over the building of an expressway ramp to its shopping center. The other way around it is to buy an existing chain-the strategy Wal-Mart pursued, to its resounding profit, in England (ASDA) and Japan (Seiyu). But retail is lucrative in Russia—the food market alone was estimated to be more than $140 billion last year—and it's less than a decade old, so there aren't many sellers just yet. An existing chain of 50 stores will now cost about $2 billion. It may seem like a bargain—Wal-Mart lobbied Tony Blair to allow its $14 billion deal to go through, but ASDA was a ready-made, highly developed product. When Wal-Mart purchased it in 1999, the 50-year-old company was already Britain's No. 2 retailer and had started mimicking Wal-Mart's methods. By contrast, Russian chains are still less than a decade old based on local, logistically fraught distribution chains.

Russian analysts estimate it will cost about $15 million to $20 million to build and stock each store. Unfortunately, Russian borders aren't the most permeable. Often, authorities stop goods at the gate—say, goods coming from China—skim a little off the top, or just impound the whole lot without explanation or recourse. In 2006, for example, Russian customs agents seized 167,000 Motorola cell phones and, after changing their reasons for doing so a few times, ground about 50,000 of them to a fine metallic powder. Also, the country is huge; even if those Chinese goods get into the country, the roads and railways spanning its 11 time zones are uneven at best and nonexistent at worst. (Don't try to fly the goods, though, since Russian domestic flights tend to fall out of the sky with alarming frequency.) This matters a lot for Wal-Mart, since it has built its entire empire on big volumes of cheap goods from China coursing through a speedy, ultraefficient distribution network. Natalya Zagvozdina, a retail analyst with Renaissance Capital, puts Russia's infrastructural readiness at somewhere near 25 percent. "And that's probably a generous estimate," she adds.