The investment by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority will help rebuild Citigroup’s capital levels, which have been eroded by a credit crunch that began in August, a media report said on Tuesday.

Citigroup Chief Executive Charles Prince resigned earlier this month after the bank, which had already written off billions of dollars, was facing as much as $ 11 billion more in losses.

As a result of the deal the investment authority known as ADIA will become one of Citigroup’s largest shareholders, with a stake of less than 5 per cent, the Wall Street Journal said.

The stake will exceed that of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, long known as one of Citigroup’s largest share holders, it quoted people familiar with the deal as saying.

The investment, the journal added, underscores the growing role that Middle Eastern investors are taking outside their home turf.

Separately on Monday, an investment company owned by Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, bought a stake in Sony Corp., the paper said, adding ADIA, which has almost USD one trillion under management, this summer bought a small stake in Apollo Management LP.

In exchange for its investment, ADIA will receive convertible stock in Citigroup yielding 11 per cent annually. The shares are required to be converted into common stock at a conversion price of a maximum $ 37.24 a share over a period of time between March 2010 and September 2011.

ADIA, which is a client of Citigroup, won’t have any governance rights in the bank, the paper said.

WASHINGTON: Sears Holdings, the owner of Kenmore appliances and the Mart and Sears retail chains, will appoint executives to run each of its business lines after saying profit may decline for a third straight quarter.

Each unit’s performance will have a designated leader and a group of executive advisers to oversee performance, Sears spokesman Chris Brathwaite said Saturday in a e-mail. He didn’t give details on what each division would do. The company has Lands’ End clothing stores and sells Craftsman tools and DieHard batteries at the Sears and Kmart chains.

The decision follows Sears’s disclosure last week that fourth-quarter profit may drop by more than 50% after US holiday sales fell. The biggest US department store company has reported declining sales in stores open at least a year every quarter since chairman Edward Lampert combined Kmart and Sears, Roebuck in March 2005.

Sears, which declined 39% last year in Nasdaq Stock Market trading, will give “greater control, authority and autonomy” to the individual businesses, Brathwaite said in the statement.

Since putting the retailer together, Lampert has centralised functions, giving executives responsibilities that stretched across the company. The marketing chief for the Sears brand, for instance, reports to Sears Holding chief marketing officer Maureen McGuire. The retailer, which blamed increased competition and “unfavourable economic conditions” for the drop in fourth-quarter profit, posted declines in the second and third quarters, with third-quarter net income declining 99%.

Corwin Yulinsky, executive vice-president of customer strategy, and Senior vice-president Dev Mukherjee briefed executives on the plans on January 17, the Wall Street Journal said Saturday. Lampert, 45, has tried to lure customers by extending products over the whole organisation, adding Lands’ End clothing to Sears stores and Craftsman tools at Kmart.

He boosted technology investments and introduced advertising campaigns this year for both chains while telling shareholders at the company’s annual meeting in May that fixing retail was ‘a priority’. analysts say he’s underinvested in the stores for too long.

“Once people decide they’re not going to shop there anymore, it’s hard to get them to come back,” Jon Fisher, a portfolio manager with Fifth Third Asset Management, said January 14. His firm manages $22 billion in assets, including Sears stock.

The retailer has also lost a senior executive, chief customer officer John Walden, who is no longer with the company after a year at Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based Sears, Brathwaite said.

Of the seven analysts that cover the 122-year-old Sears, only one has a ‘buy’ recommendation, while four advocate selling the shares, according to data compiled by agencies. The remainder advise holding the stock.

Lampert’s ESL Investments bought Kmart debt during the discount chain’s bankruptcy and became its largest shareholder after the retailer’s emergence from court protection in May 2003. Lampert engineered Kmart’s $12.3 billion acquisition of Sears, Roebuck less than three years later to form Sears Holding. His funds hold 48% of the company, according to agencies data.

Sears gained 29% in the eight months after Lampert said in August 2006 that the company may make acquisitions outside the retail industry, sparking speculation that he would run the Sears like a hedge fund. Further sales declines have weighed on the shares since April.

Sears, which rose 50 cents in Nasdaq trading Saturday to $89.43, has fallen 12% this year. Analysts on average predict Sears shares will decline to $74.75 in the next 12 months, according to data.

No SUV-driving American shopper would be surprised to find 20 lb. sacks of dog chow at a Wal-Mart supercenter. But at an urban minimart that is trying to attract bag-toting pedestrians? Not so much.

Wal-Mart is struggling to expand with small stores as it seeks to penetrate big cities and jumpstart its U.S. growth. It has rolled out only a handful of Wal-Mart Express locations, and their merchandise shows a lack of adaptation from the Supercenter formula, as Shelly Banjo explains on Lunch Break.

Unless that minimart is operated by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The Bentonville, Ark., retailer is betting that small urban stores called Walmart Express could eventually help jump-start its growth in the U.S. and fight off competition from rapidly expanding dollar-store chains.

The heavy bags of Ol’ Roy dog food suggest Wal-Mart is struggling to think outside the supercenters that remain its focus, analysts say. The world’s largest retailer has rolled out fewer than a dozen Wal-Mart Express locations since it launched the first 15,000 square-foot store a year ago, and experts say its effort to offer supercenter pricing and assortment in small, high-cost spaces is putting pressure on the minimarts’ profitability.

Wal-Mart declined to comment ahead of its quarterly earnings report on Thursday. But in a March analysts’ conference, finance chief Charles Holley said the company didn’t have enough results to open thousands of small-format stores. The venture, he emphasized, was still “a pilot.”

He described the company as moving slowly on purpose, citing a similar, 13-year effort to make its Neighborhood Markets profitable; the company has opened 199 of the grocery stores since 1998 and plans to open 80 this year. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters project a fiscal first-quarter profit of $1.04 a share on revenue of $110.5 billion; a year earlier, Wal-Mart reported earnings of 97 cents and $104 billion of revenue. The company’s stores open at least a year are expected to report a third-consecutive quarter of modest growth.

Double-digit sales gains overseas have been a big driver of results in recent years. Investors are eager to see Wal-Mart develop a strategy for accelerating its U.S. growth.

The company wants to do the same in the U.S. At Wal-Mart’s annual meeting last June, U.S. stores chief Bill Simon said he would like the Express Stores “to deliver the same experience that a supercenter can deliver, only in 15,000 square feet.”

Problem is Wal-Mart has taken that statement quite literally, said Leon Nicholas of the consulting firm Kantar Retail.

“Wal-Mart can’t pull itself away from a supercenter mind-set,” he said. “Just look at the shelves. It is just absurd to see a dozen kinds of jelly or peanut butter when a shopper just wants to get in and out of the store quickly.”

Prices of items such as Skippy peanut butter and Kellogg’s cornflakes at a Wal-Mart Express store near Fayetteville, Ark. were identical to those at a nearby Wal-Mart supercenter, according to a recent Kantar study. The same buyers select goods for the Express stores as the supercenters.

Some customers like it. Rhonda Wright, 43, filled a plastic basket with items including cocoa butter skin lotion at a Wal-Mart Express in Chicago last week. A bank teller who lives about 15 minutes from the store, Ms. Wright said found it quicker “and a little easier to find things” than at a supercenter.

Some analysts question why Wal-Mart isn’t moving faster and why it has added or remodeled more than 120 supercenters last fiscal year, while other big-box retailers, including Best Buy Co., Staples Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. shutter dozens of stores.

“Wal-Mart is the only retailer out there continuing to open up big box stores, which leads me to think they’re not paying enough attention to what the consumer needs,” said Charles Grom, an analyst at Deutsche Bank who has a sell rating on Wal-Mart. “Eleven Express stores is a drop in the bucket.”

—Owen Fletcher contributed to this article.

Write to Shelly Banjo at shelly.banjo@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 17, 2012, on page B2 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Can Wal-Mart Think Small?.