Amazon Becomes World's Largest Company by Revenue, Overtaking Walmart

Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, has for the first time overtaken Walmart to become the world's largest company by annual revenue.

Yonhap News Agency

On the 19th (local time), Walmart disclosed that its annual revenue last year rose 4.7% year-on-year to 713.2 billion dollars (about 1,034 trillion won). This is more than 3 billion dollars lower than Amazon's revenue of 716.9 billion dollars (about 1,040 trillion won) announced on the 5th of this month. As a result, Walmart has handed over to Amazon the title of the world's largest company by revenue, which it had held for 13 years.

Amazon became the world's largest company by revenue 32 years after Jeff Bezos founded it in 1994 as an online bookstore in a garage in Seattle, Washington, in the United States. The two companies, often referred to as distribution giants in the online and offline sectors respectively, have recently been mounting aggressive offensives into each other's strongholds.

Amazon, the online powerhouse, is pushing into the offline market by acquiring Whole Foods and opening local retail stores. Walmart, whose main business is discount stores, is ramping up its marketing for online shopping and related services.

However, Amazon's rise to the top in global revenue is analyzed as stemming more from its transformation into a technology company centered on cloud computing than from its retail operations. Most of Walmart's revenue comes from retail. By contrast, Amazon's annual revenue is around 588 billion dollars if sales from its cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), are excluded.

Kirti Kalyanam, director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, told Bloomberg News that "Amazon has not beaten Walmart in retail competition; it has pulled ahead in revenue by pioneering new business areas that Walmart does not operate," describing this as a "hollow victory."