Walmart posts the largest revenue year in corporate history — $713 billion — and quietly changes CEOs

Every figure in this article is drawn from Walmart's earnings releases and SEC filings, or from reporting by CNBC, CNN, NPR, CBS News and Business Wire as attributed. Walmart reports its next quarter on August 20 — the morning after this article's publication — and those results will update the most recent figures here. Sections marked as analysis are identified as such.

In February, Walmart reported a number with no precedent in the history of commerce: $713.2 billion of annual revenue — the first $700 billion year any company has ever recorded. Two weeks earlier it had changed chief executives for only the sixth time in its history, with almost none of the drama such handovers usually carry: Doug McMillon retired after twelve years, and John Furner — a thirty-year Walmart veteran who started as an hourly store associate — took over on February 1.

The world's largest company by revenue is also, reliably, its most underestimated. The past eighteen months should end that habit.

The machine, measured

The most recent reported quarter — the first under Furner, reported May 21 — showed the pattern in miniature: revenue of $177.8 billion, up 7.3 per cent, ahead of expectations; U.S. comparable sales up 4.1 per cent; net income of $5.3 billion, up 19 per cent. And around the core, the growth businesses compounding much faster: global e-commerce up 26 per cent, advertising up 37 per cent, membership income up 17 per cent.

The market's one complaint was instructive about how fine the margins of judgment have become: roughly $175 million of unexpected fuel costs shaved the operating-income growth rate, and the stock dipped. Free cash flow ran negative for the quarter as automation and technology spending continued — a sentence that would have been unthinkable at Walmart a decade ago and now passes without comment.

Membership deserves its own line in that ledger. Walmart+ posted a record quarter of new sign-ups, and the company says members spend roughly four times more than non-members, with seven times the e-commerce visits — the flywheel Amazon Prime proved, running inside a company with eleven times Amazon's store count and a grocery business Amazon never cracked.

The tech company in the parking lot

Here is the part the Amazon-centric narrative keeps missing. In May 2025, Walmart's e-commerce operation turned profitable for the first time — in the United States and globally — powered by dense store-based delivery, a marketplace, and an advertising business that now grows nearly 40 per cent a year. U.S. online sales reached $99.6 billion last fiscal year, up from $79.3 billion the year before. Roughly 60 per cent of stores are now served by an automated supply chain, with unit costs down as much as 20 per cent where the robots run, and management saying the heaviest automation spending will peak within two years.

Then there is the agent story, where Walmart has been faster — and more decisive — than almost anyone. In October 2025 it became a launch partner for buying inside ChatGPT. By March 2026 it had pulled out of that arrangement as the experience disappointed, and pivoted: rather than let OpenAI own the checkout, Walmart's own shopping agent, Sparky, travels into the chatbots. "The Sparky experience will travel directly into ChatGPT and Gemini and anybody else that we ever integrate with," Walmart's AI chief Daniel Danker said in March. Furner told investors in May that Sparky's weekly active users had doubled in a single quarter, adding, "We're also becoming AI native." Try it fast, kill it fast, keep the customer relationship — it is the most disciplined agentic-commerce strategy any retailer has shown.

The price of low prices

Walmart's hardest year-and-a-half was fought over pennies. Through 2025 the company absorbed tariff-driven costs it said were rising continuously — McMillon told investors in August 2025: "As we replenish inventory at post-tariff price levels, we've continued to see our costs increase each week, which we expect will continue into the third and fourth quarters." Prices rose; lower-income customers visibly traded down or skipped discretionary purchases; and, in the defining irony of modern Walmart, its fastest share gains came from households earning over $100,000, drawn by grocery prices and delivery convenience.

The Supreme Court's February ruling striking down the tariff regime removed one headwind just as fuel costs raised another — and the company's answer, per finance chief John David Rainey, was to keep biasing toward "price investment": eat cost to hold prices down. That reflex, more than any algorithm, is the moat. It is also why guidance under Furner is deliberately modest — full-year sales growth of 3.5 to 4.5 per cent — from a company that just beat every number it printed.

Shareholders, meanwhile, got the quiet rewards of scale: a dividend raised for the 53rd consecutive year, and a new $30 billion buyback authorisation.

None of it is glamorous. That is the point. Walmart's advantage has always been that its innovations look like plumbing — a cheaper route to the shelf, a faster path to the door, a robot in a warehouse nobody tours. The fiscal year that just ended converted that plumbing into the largest revenue figure ever printed, and the company celebrated by guiding conservatively.

Analysis: the understatement strategy

The following section is analysis, drawn from the reported facts above.

Set Walmart's numbers next to the companies that dominate the business press and the comparison is startling. It built a profitable e-commerce operation the way Amazon's retail arm took two decades to; an advertising business growing like a tech platform's; a membership programme whose members shop four times more; and a robotics programme measured in unit-cost points rather than press releases. It did this while employing more people than any private company on Earth and growing revenue by more, in absolute dollars, than most of the S&P 500 is worth.

The strategic question of the Furner era is the agent one, and it is existential for all of retail: when shopping moves into AI assistants, whoever owns the agent owns the customer. Walmart's answer — abandon the platform's checkout, embed its own agent everywhere — is a bet that the Walmart relationship, not the chatbot, is the durable asset. Amazon is making the opposite bet with its own assistant inside its own walls. One of them is right, and the outcome will decide more retail value than any tariff ruling.

Tomorrow morning, Walmart reports again, and the numbers will change — the streak of quiet, unglamorous over-delivery is itself the story's test. The company that never touches $5 trillion valuations or AI keynotes just recorded the largest revenue year in the history of capitalism, handed itself from one lifer to another without a tremor, and told everyone to expect a bit less than it will probably deliver. Underestimating it has been a losing trade for sixty years. It still is.

Sources

• Walmart Q1 FY2027 earnings release and call, May 21, 2026 — revenue $177.8B (+7.3%), U.S. comps +4.1%, e-commerce +26%, advertising +37%, membership +17.4%, net income $5.33B, negative quarterly free cash flow, ~$175M fuel-cost impact per CFO remarks, FY guidance, Furner quotes; CNBC same-day coverage.
• Walmart Q4/FY2026 results (SEC Form 8-K and 10-K), February 19, 2026 — fiscal 2026 revenue $713.2B (+4.7%), U.S. e-commerce $99.6B; dividend raised to $0.99 (53rd consecutive increase) and $30B buyback per Walmart releases and Business Wire.
• Walmart 8-K and Business Wire, November 14, 2025 — John Furner named president and CEO effective February 1, 2026; McMillon's retirement and advisory role.
• CNBC, May 15, 2025 — e-commerce profitable for the first time, U.S. and globally.
• CNBC, CBS News and Walmart announcement, October 14, 2025 — the ChatGPT Instant Checkout partnership; CNBC, March 20 and 24, 2026 — the unwind and Danker's Sparky remarks at the Morgan Stanley conference.
• Walmart Global Tech blog, 2025 — the four "super agent" consolidation (Sparky, Marty and others); CNBC, January 11, 2026 — the Google Gemini shopping partnership.
• CNBC and NPR, August 21–22, 2025 — McMillon's tariff-cost remarks and consumer trade-down; CNBC — higher-income household share gains.
• Supply Chain Dive, February 2026 — automation coverage (~60% of stores, unit-cost gains, spending peak) from the Q4 FY2026 call.
• Congressional Research Service summary — the Supreme Court's February 20, 2026 ruling invalidating the IEEPA tariffs.

Figures are in U.S. dollars as reported; Walmart's fiscal year ends January 31. The Sparky order-value statistics circulating in trade press are excluded as unverified. Q2 FY2027 results, due August 20, 2026, will supersede the quarterly figures above.