Good morning. Amazon is poised to take Walmart’s top spot in what has become a contest between two tech-enabled giants.
After Walmart reported a record $713.2 billion in fiscal-year revenue on Thursday, Amazon edged past it with $716.9 billion for 2025—positioning the Seattle-based company to debut at No. 1 on the next Fortune 500 ranking, set for release in June.
That would mark a significant shift. For the past 13 years—and 21 of the past 24—Walmart has held the No. 1 spot on the list. Fifteen years ago, Amazon was a fraction of Walmart’s size; today, its multi-engine model, spanning e-commerce, logistics, AWS, and a fast-growing advertising business, has produced a growth rate roughly three times Walmart’s in recent years. The result is not just a new revenue leader, but a reshaped definition of what a “retailer” looks like in the age of cloud computing and AI.
Yet the deeper story for CFOs and investors is how much these two rivals now resemble each other. Walmart is leaning into e-commerce, data, automation, and advertising, while Amazon continues to invest heavily in physical infrastructure and everyday essentials. You can read more about the numbers, the strategy, and what Amazon’s long march past Walmart signals about the future of scale, margins, and customer “obsession” in a deep dive by Fortune’s Phil Wahba.
