Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, has overtaken traditional retail powerhouse Walmart to claim the No. 1 spot in global corporations by revenue. It is a milestone achieved 32 years after Jeff Bezos founded an online bookstore in the garage of his Seattle home in 1994. Walmart, meanwhile, has yielded the throne it held for more than a decade as the top revenue company.
On the 19th, Walmart released that its annual revenue for the 2025 fiscal year rose 5.6% from a year earlier to $713.2 billion (about 1,034.8 trillion won). Amazon's annual revenue for 2025, released earlier this month, is $716.9 billion (about 1,040.15 trillion won). That is roughly $3.7 billion above Walmart's revenue. With this, Amazon has, for the first time ever, secured the title of the world's largest corporations by annual revenue.
The two companies have waged fierce competition in the United States, the world's largest consumer market, with offline versus online as their battleground. Walmart is the world's largest offline retail company, with more than 10,000 stores worldwide. Amazon is the world's largest online retailer, with 2.7 billion visits to its website and mobile app each month. In recent years, offline retailers have expanded into the online market, while online retailers have increased their offline stores, encroaching on each other's turf.
Experts point to Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing institutional sector, as the decisive factor behind Amazon's No. 1 revenue ranking. Cloud computing refers to a technology in which corporations rent storage space or computing power over the internet instead of building their own servers. While its core retail business and fast delivery network have driven steady growth, the massive revenue that ultimately allowed it to surpass Walmart came from the data center business. Last year, Amazon Web Services accounted for 18% of Amazon's total revenue. Analyses suggest that if the cloud institutional sector were excluded, Amazon's annual revenue would have been only $588 billion.
Because of this, some experts assessed that Walmart still has the upper hand if the retail market alone is considered. Kirti Kalyanam, head of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, said in a Bloomberg interview that "Amazon did not beat Walmart in retail; it started a new business that Walmart does not operate and overtook Walmart in revenue," dismissing Amazon's ascent to No. 1 as a "hollow victory."
Walmart, too, is aggressively pushing to remake itself into an information technology corporations beyond a traditional big-box discounter. Its recent move to switch its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the tech-heavy Nasdaq underscores that intent. It is concentrating investment in new areas with high profitability, such as its third-party seller marketplace. Buoyed by this strategic shift, Walmart's share price has more than doubled over the past two years, and its market value has surpassed $1 trillion. As consumers weary of high inflation flocked to Walmart in search of cheaper goods, fourth-quarter same-store sales posted a 4.6% growth rate, beating market expectations.
The two retail giants now appear to be escalating their rivalry into artificial intelligence. Amazon has jumped directly into building an AI ecosystem on the back of massive capital. It plans to pour up to $200 billion this year into AI-related businesses such as data centers and semiconductor chips. It has deployed its in-house shopping assistant chatbot, Rufus, across its platform. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy emphasized that AI tools like Rufus will help shoppers find the products they want as if assisted by an in-store employee.
Walmart, by contrast, has chosen to collaborate flexibly with external technology corporations. It has formed partnerships with OpenAI and Google to further enhance its product search capabilities. It also introduced an AI-based virtual assistant called "Sparky." Walmart CEO John Furner said at the earnings release that customers who use Sparky have an average order value 35% higher than those who do not. Walmart CFO John David Rainey said in a CNBC interview, "Tech companies will develop innovative technology, and we will focus on turning that technology into retail experiences," explaining the strategy.