Amazon has officially overtaken Walmart as the world’s largest company by revenue. In 2025, the e-commerce major reported $717 billion in sales, compared to Walmart’s $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending January 31. The shift ends more than a decade of Walmart holding the top position. However, analysts note that the comparison requires context: without Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing division, Amazon’s 2025 revenue would have stood at $588 billion, meaning the milestone rests largely on a business Walmart does not compete in. Walmart remains the largest physical retailer in the world, with more than 10,000 stores globally, and continues to hold an edge in brick-and-mortar retail while growing its e-commerce operations, an area where Amazon has struggled to establish a comparable physical presence despite its 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods Market.
Why analysts think that Walmart doesn’t need to ‘worry much’ about rival Amazon overtaking it to become world’s No 1 company by sales
In a statement to Bloomberg, Kirthi Kalyanam, executive director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, argued that the revenue milestone carries limited weight in retail terms. “This is a hollow victory. 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.”Holding the top position by revenue reflects scale and consumer reach. However, it is not necessarily a metric that investors place significant value on. Before Walmart, Exxon Mobil and General Motors held the distinction, a position that brings greater political scrutiny and customer expectations. To compare, Nvidia has a market capitalisation of $4.5 trillion, more than double Amazon’s and more than four times Walmart’s.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who first overtook Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as the world’s wealthiest person in 2017, currently ranks fourth on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with estimated assets of $228 billion largely tied to his Amazon stock holdings. Bezos has long studied Walmart founder Sam Walton’s business strategies, incorporating many of them into Amazon’s operations, the report noted. Over the past decade, Amazon’s revenue has grown at nearly 10 times the pace of Walmart’s, driven by a shift in consumer spending from physical stores to online platforms and the rapid expansion of AWS.The two companies compete directly for consumer spending. Amazon draws 2.7 billion visits each month across its website and mobile apps, while Walmart operates more than 10,000 stores and shopping clubs globally. Both generate the bulk of their revenue in the US.
