Amazon to Pass Walmart and Become America’s Largest Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 10, 7:02AM EST · Published Feb 9, 8:55AM EST

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Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is poised to overtake Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) as the largest public company in the United States.
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Amazon to Pass Walmart and Become America’s Largest Company — © Scott Olson / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT | WMT Price Prediction) has been the largest public company in the United States for most of the 20th century, having taken the crown from General Motors. Several megacap tech companies have grown fast enough that Walmart was unlikely to keep its lead forever. In the next year, based on total revenue, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) will pass it.

Earlier this week, Yahoo Finance posted, “Yesterday, Amazon posted fourth quarter sales of $187.8 billion, a 10% increase. Revenue from Walmart, whose numbers are due on Feb. 20, is predicted to rise 4% to $180 billion.”

Oddly, commerce was not the sole engine of Amazon’s growth. Its fastest-growing unit is AWS, the world’s largest cloud computing business. Worldwide, AWS has a market share of about 31%. Microsoft’s Azure is second at 20%.

In the most recent quarter, Amazon broke its business into three units. North American revenue was $115.6 billion, and operating revenue was $9.3 billion. International revenue was $43.4 billion, and operating revenue was $1.3 billion. AWS revenue was $28.8 billion, and its operating income was $10.6 billion

The success of the two companies has created some of the richest people in the world. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $249 billion. Walmart founder Sam Walton’s children—Jim, Bob, and Alice—each have a net worth of about $122 billion.

Wall Street thinks more of Amazon’s prospects than of Walmart’s. Amazon has a market cap of $2.43 trillion, while Walmart’s is $813 billion.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.