Walmart’s 13-year run ends as another retail giant becomes the world's largest company
From a sales perspective, Walmart has been on top for several years thanks to high revenue.
Feb. 20 2026, Published 6:10 a.m. ET
Walmart has been the world’s biggest company by sales for several years now, but recently, it was dethroned from the top. The retailer has its biggest customer base in the US, and with nearly 11,000 stores employing more than 2 million people, that other businesses could only dream of calling a competition. All that has changed recently, as Amazon announced a slightly larger revenue figure, making it the world’s biggest company by sales.
When it comes to retail, Amazon still falls behind Walmart despite its purchase of Whole Foods in 2017. However, the company is the world’s largest online retailer with 1.6 million people on its payroll. As per a report in NPR, Amazon was able to dethrone Walmart with its investment in its lucrative cloud-computing business, AWS. The company reported $716.9 billion in revenue for the year ending in December, whereas Walmart reported $713.2 billion.
At the moment, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest provider of cloud computing in the world, having recorded its fastest growth rate last year. Thousands of companies are turning to AWS as the world sees a paradigm shift in the usage of AI for efficiency and savings. AWS’s massive web of data centres makes it a much more viable option for a lot of companies looking to take advantage of the AI revolution and grow faster.
While Amazon has beaten Walmart recently, the competition between the two is far from over. Walmart reported 24% growth in its online sales and a notable expansion of its fastest deliveries recently. The company’s stock surpassed $1 trillion in market value as well. The retailer claims that there has been an increase in wealthier Americans using their services, which led to such massive growth.
The company noted an increase in wealthy Americans using its online service last year and has since taken steps to ensure that these customers retain their faith in the company. One of the methods of doing so is maintaining quick deliveries around affluent residential locations. The company introduced dark stores, which would store popular items that are usually ordered online so that customers can get them as soon as possible.
"Certainly, with a more affluent customer base that's coming to Walmart now, there's an opportunity to serve [them] in maybe more of a dark store format, where you don't have customers going into stores, but we can serve them through eCommerce," CFO John David Rainey had said. "We're experimenting with that, and the early returns are encouraging.” Rainey also claimed that their top-selling product at the time was AirPods, an Apple product that is expensive. "One of the top-selling items was AirPods, which ... maybe is more attractive to the more affluent customer," he said. "It's indicative of how Walmart is changing, and how our customer base is changing."
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