Amazon Will Soon Dethrone Walmart In Revenue

This is gonna put a damper on the Walton Family Super Bowl watch party. Yesterday, Amazon almost certainly passed Walmart in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, reeling in $187.8 billion as the online retailer continued to push its brick-and-mortar rival to its limits.

Amazon beat out the $180 billion in Q4 revenue that analysts expect Walmart to report in two weeks, robbing the American institution of one of its last vestiges of superiority. Walmart has held on tight to its title as the No. 1 revenue-generating company in the world for the last 12 years, though Amazon’s had a higher market cap ($2.5 trillion) than Walmart ($826 billion) since 2015.

It’s not just about your shopping cart

Your Smeg kettle and Nest candle orders didn’t make this happen. While Walmart makes most of its profit from retail sales, Amazon makes a large portion of its profit from the non-retail operations that it’s ramped up in recent years:

• Revenue from Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing service, has more than doubled since 2020. It accounts for ~17% of annual sales.
• Amazon also has a supremely fast-growing digital ad service, which grew 19% year over year in Q3 2024, bringing in $14 billion.

Both are learning from each other. Walmart is taking a page from Amazon’s playbook by making a name for itself in the digital ad biz. It bought TV company Vizio last year, aiming to mimic how Amazon uses Prime Video to deliver ads. Its in-store ad business, Walmart Connect, grew 30% from 2023 to 2024.

On the flip side, Amazon is trying to bulk up its grocery sales—the one department where Walmart has a clear lead—with delivery subscription services for Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods.—CC