$717 billion! Amazon surpasses Walmart for the first time to take the global annual revenue crown

E-commerce giant Amazon officially surpasses retail leader Walmart to become the world’s highest-revenue company annually.

On February 19th, local time, Walmart released its fiscal year earnings report showing that, for the 12 months ending January 31, 2026, the company achieved sales of $713.2 billion; meanwhile, Amazon previously disclosed that its total sales for 2025 reached $717 billion, surpassing Walmart by $3.8 billion.

Previously, relying on its global network of physical stores and low-price strategies, Walmart had maintained the top spot in global revenue for 13 consecutive years. Over the past 20 years, Walmart’s revenue has more than doubled. The company has also been continuously expanding its online business. In the latest fiscal quarter, Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce sales grew 27% year-over-year, maintaining double-digit growth for 15 consecutive quarters.

On the other hand, Amazon has expanded its revenue through its diversified business structure. Beyond e-commerce retail, Amazon’s cloud computing division AWS has become a major revenue engine. In 2025, AWS cloud sales grew 20% year-over-year to $128.7 billion, accounting for about 18% of the company’s total revenue. Additionally, advertising, third-party seller services, and Prime membership subscriptions have also contributed significant revenue growth for Amazon.

Therefore, although Amazon has overtaken Walmart in total revenue, the two companies have markedly different business compositions. Most of Walmart’s income comes from physical retail and grocery sales, with data showing that for every $4 spent on groceries in the U.S., $1 goes to Walmart stores. Amazon, meanwhile, has built a diversified business landscape covering e-commerce, cloud computing, digital advertising, and streaming media, with high-margin businesses like cloud computing and advertising continuing to increase their share.

Walmart is actively learning from Amazon’s success, attempting to position itself as a hybrid of a technology company and a retailer.

In early December last year, Walmart moved its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq, known for its tech stocks; earlier this month, Walmart’s market value briefly surpassed $1 trillion. Financial reports also show that digital advertising and third-party platform businesses significantly boosted profitability in the last fiscal quarter, reflecting Walmart’s accelerated shift toward high-margin businesses and reduced reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar retail.

Meanwhile, the two giants are also leveraging AI (artificial intelligence) to reshape the competitive landscape. In October last year, Walmart partnered with OpenAI, allowing customers to place orders directly through the ChatGPT chatbot; in January, Walmart announced a collaboration with Google to integrate the generative AI chatbot Gemini into the shopping process, while continuing to invest heavily in supply chain automation and store renovations.

Amazon plans to invest approximately $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, a year-over-year increase of over 50%. The company will actively invest in data centers and infrastructure to meet the surge in AI demand, with expected continued growth in capital spending this year. Company executives stated that most of the capital expenditure will go toward AWS, as growth in non-AI workloads on AWS has exceeded expectations. However, investor attitudes toward such massive AI investments are beginning to diverge.

On the 19th, Amazon’s stock (Nasdaq: AMZN) rose 0.03%, closing at $204.86 per share, with a total market value of $2.20 trillion; Walmart (WMT) fell 1.38%, closing at $124.87 per share, with a total market value of $995.2 billion.

(Source: The Paper)