For the past five years, the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on the Fortune 500 have reflected a head-to-head retail rivalry. Walmart, which has ranked in first or second place on the list of America’s biggest companies by revenue every year of the 21st century and has been No. 1 for 12 years in a row, began competing with Amazon for the top spot beginning with the 2020 list, published that spring. (On the 2022 and 2024 Global 500 lists, Amazon was also No. 2.)
The 2020 edition of the Fortune 500 was published amid COVID pandemic lockdowns; however, its rankings reflected results from 2019—so, pre-pandemic financial performance. But from that point, Amazon’s ascent to runner-up status, which had long been in the works, seemed sure to be a fixture of the list for years to come, as consumer behavior during a stay-at-home era fueled online shopping out of both necessity and boredom.
Walmart, of course, has its own robust e-commerce business, and consumers were ordering toilet paper and disinfectants, among other items, from wherever they could get their hands on them. But as past Fortune staffer and contributor Brian Dumaine wrote in the magazine in May 2020, pegged to the release of his book Bezonomics that same month, “If you were designing a company from scratch that could capitalize on a global crisis, it would probably look a lot like Amazon.” That fact goes beyond the company’s status as the “everything store”: Amazon Web Services cloud computing powers much of the world’s digital infrastructure (which proved to be increasingly lucrative upon COVID’s onset). And Prime, Amazon’s subscription business, continues to entice new signups with offerings spanning retail discounts and entertainment streaming. Prime boasts a reported three times the number of members of analog Walmart+.
One key foothold that Walmart has over Amazon is its stores. Amazon has acquired Whole Foods, launched brick-and-mortar brands such as Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh, and partnered with many other retailers on grocery delivery and shipping. Still, given that approximately 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store, Walmart has an advantage when it comes to the physical infrastructure that underpins selling goods online.
The Walmart-Amazon rivalry is a microcosm of many key economic dynamics that define the Fortune 500. There’s much to examine about these companies’ rise to become the highest-revenue-generating corporations in the world—and their competition with each other.
The numbers to know
28%... Amazon’s average year-over-year sales growth between 2002 (the year Amazon debuted on the Fortune 500, at No. 492) and 2020 (the year it reached No. 2).
$100 billion… Walmart’s global e-commerce sales reached this threshold for the first time in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2024.
$574.79 billion… Amazon’s revenue (in 2023 dollars) on the 2024 Fortune 500. In just six years, its revenue has more than tripled from $177.87 billion, which was its revenue on the 2018 Fortune 500 (2017 dollars), the year when it cracked the top 10 for the first time (No. 8).
$648.13 billion… Walmart’s revenue (in 2023 dollars) on the 2024 Fortune 500. Over the same six-year stretch described above, Walmart’s revenue grew a total of 29.5%, from $500.34 billion (2018 list/2017 dollars).
60 million… the number of Walmart+ members reported within the past year, compared to roughly 180 million Amazon Prime members.
$1.86 trillion… Amazon’s market capitalization as of today. It exceeded $2 trillion briefly in June.
$611.55 billion… Walmart’s market capitalization as of today.
The big picture
The Fortune 500 editorial and research teams have been looking at the horizon for years positing when (not if, but when) Amazon will surpass Walmart and claim No. 1 for the first time—they estimate it’ll be within three years. As we continue to report on and observe the performance and activity of Fortune 500 contenders, no other top-10 companies are in that conversation. Apple, No. 3, trails Amazon with revenue totaling $191.5 billion less. The difference between Walmart’s and Amazon’s revenues today is about $73.34 billion.
One trend among the Fortune 500 in recent years is the onslaught by health care companies in the list’s upper ranks, and both Amazon and Walmart have regularly made and just as regularly abandoned deals to expand further into that space. In one case, they jockeyed to purchase the same pharmacy startup, as Fortune tech correspondent Jason Del Rey wrote in his 2023 book, Winner Sells All.
Deeper takeaways
They beat the competition
In the pages of the 2019 Fortune 500 issue, the summary analyses by Fortune staff of the year’s biggest shifts didn’t even mention Amazon. But a big retail feature in that issue was about the downfall of Sears, a longtime fixture which fell off the list that year after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2018. As Fortune senior writer Phil Wahba noted in an accompanying piece, when Sears got rid of its catalog, it set itself back on the e-commerce front, which would soon become crucial.
In 1995, when the Fortune 500 incorporated service companies for the first time in addition to industrials, Walmart was No. 4. There were just five other “general merchandisers,” as the retail sector was classified at the time, among the Fortune 100 that year: Sears Roebuck (No. 9), Kmart (No. 15; acquired by Sears a decade later), Dayton Hudson (No. 30), J.C. Penney (No. 32), and May Department Stores (No. 82). Amazon was founded the year prior, in 1994. Dayton Hudson is now Target Corporation, which sits at No. 37 today. The last year J.C. Penney was on the Fortune 500 list was 2020, while May Department Stores ceased operations in 2005.
They leveraged tech
Just as the Fortune 500 has evolved over the years to include a greater number of health care companies toward the top of the list, tech companies are also among Walmart and Amazon’s biggest rivals for supremacy. In fact, the average person might think of Amazon as more of a tech company than a retailer.
In his 2020 article, Brian Dumaine wrote that Amazon has been a “data-driven company that just happened to do retailing” ever since its founding. The data it collects and processes about its own operations and its customers’ habits have made it a formidable force when it comes to logistics, inventory, shipping, advertising, and just about any other facet of selling and delivering goods you can think of. The company has worked its way into the most mundane and intimate parts of people’s lives.
Walmart has been sharpening its tech edge over time. It’s built a $3.4 billion advertising business stemming from its e-commerce data, and a recent $2.3 billion purchase of smart TV maker Vizio is meant to supplement this effort. Although the acquisition of Jet.com was just a four-year phase, as Phil Wahba reported on Walmart in his profile of the company and CEO Doug McMillon in the 2024 Fortune 500 issue, “working with digital-first brands and executives helped give Walmart staff a sense of daring, while speeding up their tech metabolism.”
Lydia Belanger
Director of Production, Fortune
lydia.belanger@fortune.com
