Amazon's annual sales surpass Walmart for the first time! A historic shift in the global business landscape

Cover News Reporter Li Xingyue

The global business landscape is experiencing a milestone shift. On February 19th, local time, Walmart announced its full-year fiscal 2026 performance ending January 31, 2026, with sales reaching $713.2 billion; Amazon previously disclosed that its 2025 fiscal year sales reached $717 billion, surpassing Walmart for the first time by $3.8 billion, ending its 13-year streak as the world’s top revenue-generating company. This shift not only marks a change in rankings between two giants but also signifies that a new economic model centered on digital technology and full-chain ecosystems has officially overtaken traditional brick-and-mortar retail, becoming the mainstream of global commerce.

The reshaping of the landscape behind a narrow margin

Diverse ecosystems vs. deep physical presence

Amazon’s rise to the top is driven by a “retail + technology + services” three-pronged approach: e-commerce builds traffic and fulfillment infrastructure, AWS provides high-growth, high-profit support, and advertising and membership services enhance customer lifetime value. The company plans to invest approximately $200 billion in capital expenditures by 2026, focusing on cloud computing infrastructure, AI computing power, and global logistics networks to further strengthen its technological advantage.

Walmart, on the other hand, remains committed to its core brick-and-mortar retail business, operating over 10,750 stores across 19 countries, locking in household consumption through high-frequency essentials like fresh groceries. In recent years, it has accelerated omnichannel transformation, with US e-commerce experiencing double-digit growth for 15 consecutive quarters, and improving efficiency through AI inventory management and smart shopping assistants. However, its business structure remains single, with a relatively low proportion of technology-related revenue, making it difficult to match Amazon’s diversified growth curve.

Digital economy reshaping business rules

Industry analysts point out that this surpassing is an inevitable result of the digitalization of global consumption and industry. Data, technology, and ecosystem collaboration are replacing traditional store scale and supply chain efficiency as core competitive advantages. Amazon has evolved from an online retail platform into a tech ecosystem covering transactions, logistics, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence; Walmart is transforming from a physical chain into an omnichannel retailer. The competition between the two has shifted from scale to a comprehensive contest of technology, efficiency, user experience, and global capabilities.

This transformation has profound implications for the global retail, technology, and supply chain industries: purely offline-dependent companies face growth bottlenecks, and the integrated model of “retail + digitalization + technology services” will become the mainstream form of large-scale businesses in the future.

The battle for the top enters a new normal of technology

With the proliferation of AI, cloud computing, and automated logistics, the competition between Amazon and Walmart will enter a new phase. Amazon relies on technological investments to consolidate its ecosystem advantages, while Walmart continues to deepen its offline barriers and digital transformation. Under the leadership of these two giants, the global retail and tech industries will accelerate toward intelligent, omnichannel, and ecosystem-based development.