Walmart Isn’t America’s Biggest Company Anymore

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 17, 11:37AM EST

Quick Read

Walmart Was America’s Largest Company For Years
Amazon Has A Faster Revenue Growth Rate
AWS Helps Amazon’s Revenue Increae Pace
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Walmart Isn’t America’s Biggest Company Anymore — © Buy a Gun at Walmart, Pahrump, NV, USA (BY-SA 2.0) by pom'.

Depending on the source, Walmart (NYSE: WMT | WMT Price Prediction) has ranked as the largest company in the US based on the Fortune 500 for either 13 or 14 consecutive years. It has about 4,600 locations in the US, including Supercenters, discount stores, and Sam’s Club locations. It is the largest private employer, with 1.6 million employees. Part of its revenue also comes from overseas, where it has another 500,000 workers. This sprawling business generated revenue of $690 billion in its most recent fiscal year (which includes our forecast for its final quarter; its fiscal year ends on January 31). Forecasts for this final quarter differ slightly.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) ranked as the No. 1 company last year, with revenue of $717, due to markedly different growth rates. Walmart’s annual increase is approximately 5%, and Amazon’s is approximately 14%. The Amazon number is based on its calendar fiscal.

The changes in positions on the list are not simply that a new company will take the top position. There is a changing of the guard in American business, which has been underway for a decade. Another measure of this is market capitalization (market cap). Amazon’s is $2.1 trillion. Walmart’s $1.1 trillion.

Despite significant advances in Walmart’s e-commerce operations, it remains far behind Amazon’s e-commerce revenue, which was approximately $575 billion worldwide in 2025. This makes Amazon the largest company in the world in this category (it is difficult to compare with China’s largest e-commerce companies because their rankings are not always reliable).

Walmart, at its core, remains a bricks-and-mortar company and faces the challenges that accompany that. This means, primarily, an inability to decouple from the retail category’s growth rate, in which very few companies grow at better than 5%.

Amazon, originally an online bookstore, can stock a nearly infinite number of items without physical constraints.

Amazon has diversified into several large and fast-growing businesses. It is Netflix’s (NASDAQ: NFLX) primary competitor. More importantly, it is the world’s largest cloud computing company. The AWS top line is growing at a clip of better than 20% year over year.

Amazon is also one of the largest companies in the AI sector, although it is too early to say whether this will significantly increase its revenue.

As Amazon enters the wild west of AI, Walmart’s revenue base may be more stable long term. However, Amazon’s revenue lead will continue.

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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.