Apple, Amazon Race To Top Walmart As America’s Largest Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 6, 7:23AM EST

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Apple, Amazon Race To Top Walmart As America’s Largest Company — © Courtesy of Walmart Corporate Media / corporate.walmart.com

Walmart Inc (NYSE: WMT) has been the largest U.S. company by revenue for decades. Slow growing, its revenue should still top $550 billion this year, in part due to its Sam’s Club operation and its international revenue. However, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) both topped the $100 billion revenue per quarter mark at the end of 2020, which puts them in a race to pass Walmart, particularly because of their rapid growth at the top line.

Amazon’s revenue reached $126 billion last quarter, up 44%, due primarily to holiday shopping and the shop from home trend brought on by the pandemic. While e-commerce sales continue to rise quickly, they are aided by the hypergrowth of Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud computing operations. Amazon’s growth faces a single major hurdle. Will people return to bricks and mortar retailers as the pandemic subsides? If the convenience of e-commerce continues its appeal, Amazon’s revenue could reach over $500 billion in 2021.

Apple’s revenue in the final quarter of the year hit $111 billion, up 21% compared to the same quarter the year before. Its growth rate is not as rapid as Amazon’s, but three factors could accelerate revenue. The first is what has become known as the supercycle, a once in a decade rise in iPhone sales brought on by upgrades to smartphones that run on the new ultrafast 5G networks. The next is the quickened pace of sales in China, which now has almost one billion people online–three times the U.S. figure. The last is the surge in Apple’s services revenue, which includes the App Store, Apple Pay, and the Apple TV line of products.

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As Apple and Amazon continue to grow, Walmart has been fortunate to post revenue increase in the slow single digits. The pandemic has not helped it much, at least compared to Amazon. It still continues to rely almost exclusively on the physical store to drive sales.

It has become an issue not of whether Amazon and Apple will pass Walmart in revenue. It is when, and which company will be the first to get there.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.