Amazon’s Passing Walmart To Be America’s Largest Company

Walmart (NYSE: WMT) has been the largest public company in the US for almost all of the 20th Century, having taken the crown from General Motors (NYSE: GM). Several megacap tech companies have grown fast enough that Walmart was not likely to keep its lead forever. In the next year, based on total revenue, Amazon.com 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 (NASDAQ: AMZN) growth. Its fastest growing unit is AWS, the world’s largest cloud commuting 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 $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 founders Sam Walton’s children–Jim, Bob, and Alice–each has 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. Walmart’s is $813 billion.

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