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Companies and Brands

Walmart Remains the World’s Largest Company, Barely

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Quick Read

  • Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) tops Fortune’s latest rankings of companies based on revenue.

  • However, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is close behind.

  • The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and Apple wasn't one of them. Get them here FREE.

Walmart Remains the World’s Largest Company, Barely

© WendellandCarolyn / Getty Images

Fortune has come out with its Global 500 issue. Based on revenue, Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT | WMT Price Prediction) tops the rankings at $681 billion. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) trails at $638 billion. Many of the top 50 are based in China. The United States has 138 companies on the list, while China has 130.

The U.S. still holds most of the top 10 companies. UnitedHealth Group Inc. (NYSE: UNH) is in seventh place with revenue of $400 billion. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) takes the eighth spot ($381 billion), and CVS Health Corp. (NYSE: CVS) is in ninth place ($373 billion). Rounding out the top 10 is Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-B) with $371 billion in revenue.

Most of the balance of the largest U.S. companies on the list are in tech, financial services, or automotive. The fact that JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) and General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) make the high end of the list is a sign that core financial services and manufacturing are far from dead in America.

Taken together, the Global 500 have massive revenue: “The corporations on our annual list of the world’s 500 largest companies combined to generate $41.7 trillion in revenue in 2024, up 1.8% from the previous year.” This year’s number is over 30% of global gross domestic product. Together, the companies employ 71 million people. That is more people than live in the United Kingdom.

The list shows that global commerce and finance are dominated by a very few companies, given that the global total has to be tens of millions of businesses.

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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.

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