Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending January 31. Amazon, which operates on a fiscal year ending in December, earlier this month reported 2025 sales of $717 billion.
Bezos carefully studied Walmart founder Sam Walton, embracing many of his business strategies while building his company. Over the past decade, Amazon’s revenue has increased at almost 10 times the pace of Walmart’s, fueled by a shift in consumer spending from stores to websites and its rapidly growing cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services.
Amazon and Walmart compete head-to-head for shoppers’ dollars. Amazon is the biggest online retailer, with its website and mobile apps attracting 2.7 billion visits each month. Walmart is the biggest physical retailer in the world, with more than 10,000 stores and shopping clubs globally. Both companies generate most of their revenue in the US.
Walmart is having more success developing its ecommerce operation than Amazon is having in creating a physical stores business despite its 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods Market.
But the revenue story is more about Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing, a business Walmart doesn’t compete in. Without AWS, Amazon’s 2025 revenue would have been $588 billion. So its ascendance rests largely on the importance of data centers as critical infrastructure in the age of artificial intelligence.
“This is a hollow victory,” said Kirthi Kalyanam, executive director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University. “Amazon didn’t beat Walmart in the retail game. It just beat them in revenue by launching a new business Walmart doesn’t operate in.”
Being the biggest company by revenue mostly represents scale and consumer reach, and isn’t necessarily valued by investors. Before Walmart, Exxon Mobil and General Motors had the distinction, which brings with it greater political scrutiny and customer expectations. Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalisation of $4.5 trillion, more than double Amazon’s and more than four times larger than Walmart’s.
Bezos, who first overtook Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates as the world’s wealthiest person in 2017, currently ranks fourth richest, with estimated assets of $228 billion that are largely tied to his Amazon stock holdings, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
