It was close, but Walmart is no longer the biggest company in the world.
Amazon.com Inc. reported revenue in its last fiscal year (Amazon’s fiscal year ended Dec. 31) of $717 billion, besting Walmart by some $4 billion to become the largest global revenue earner. Walmart, which had held the title for a decade, reported $713.2 billion in revenue for its fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31.
Bloomberg reported Amazon’s revenue has increased at almost 10 times the pace of Walmart’s over the last 10 years, 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, Bloomberg reorted. 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 e-commerce operation than Amazon is having in creating a physical stores business despite its 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods Market.
The revenue story is more about Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing, a business Walmart doesn’t compete in, according to Bloomberg. “This is a hollow victory,” Kirthi Kalyanam, executive director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, told Bloomberg. “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.”
