You’ve probably walked into a Walmart and felt the sheer, overwhelming scale of the place. The rows of cereal stretching into infinity, the smell of tires near the auto center, and that blue-vested army of associates everywhere you look. It feels like the center of the economic universe. But when people ask, is Walmart the biggest company in the world, the answer usually starts with a frustrating "it depends."
Honestly, it’s a bit of a trick question.
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If you’re talking about the amount of money flowing through the registers—cash in, cash out—Walmart is the undisputed heavyweight champion. It has been for years. But if you’re looking at what the stock market thinks the company is worth, or how much "stuff" it actually owns, Walmart starts to look a lot smaller than tech giants like Apple or Nvidia.
The Revenue Giant: Why Walmart Still Rules the Fortune 500
Walmart is basically a money-moving machine. In the fiscal year 2025, the company pulled in a staggering $681 billion in revenue. Just let that number sink in for a second. That is more than the GDP of many developed countries. For comparison, Amazon—their fiercest rival—trailed behind with roughly $638 billion.
There is a specific reason Walmart stays at the top of the revenue charts. It’s the "low margins, high volume" strategy. They sell a banana for 20 cents and make a tiny fraction of a penny in profit. But they do it billions of times a day across 10,500 stores.
When you look at the Fortune Global 500, which ranks companies specifically by their annual sales, Walmart has held the number one spot for twelve consecutive years as of 2025. In the world of pure sales, nobody touches them.
The Employee Count is Where Things Get Real
If "biggest" means the number of human beings who show up to work every day, Walmart isn't just a company; it’s an ecosystem. They employ about 2.1 million people globally.
To put that in perspective:
- That’s roughly the entire population of Slovenia.
- It's nearly double the size of the active-duty U.S. military.
- If all Walmart employees lived in one city, it would be one of the largest cities in America.
Amazon comes in second with around 1.5 million workers, but there’s a massive gap between them and everyone else. While tech companies like Meta or Alphabet (Google) make headlines for their influence, they operate with relatively tiny workforces. Walmart is a physical empire built on human labor.
Where Walmart Loses the "Biggest" Title
This is where the confusion kicks in. If you go to a financial news site and look at the "most valuable companies," you won’t see Walmart at the top. You’ll see Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft.
As of early 2026, the stock market values these tech companies in the $3 trillion to $4 trillion range. Walmart? It’s usually hanging out somewhere around **$900 billion to $1 trillion**.
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Why the massive gap?
Investors value tech companies based on their future potential and massive profit margins. When Apple sells a $1,200 iPhone, a huge chunk of that is pure profit. When Walmart sells a $4 gallon of milk, they’re lucky to keep a nickel. The market sees tech as "scalable" and "efficient," while retail is "labor-heavy" and "expensive to run."
So, if you define "biggest" by Market Capitalization (the total value of all shares), Walmart isn't even in the top ten. They are a massive physical presence, but they don't have the "digital gold" value that keeps Silicon Valley at the top of the charts.
The Global Contenders: Saudi Aramco and State Grid
We often have a Western bias when we talk about big business. While we argue about Amazon vs. Walmart, there are massive state-owned entities that dwarf almost everything else.
Take Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia. In terms of pure profit—not just revenue, but the money they actually keep—Aramco often makes more in a single quarter than Walmart makes in a decade. Because they control the world's most accessible oil, their "value" is often estimated to be in the trillions, rivaling Apple and Microsoft.
Then there’s State Grid Corporation of China. Most Americans have never heard of them, but they are the largest utility company in the world. They frequently land in the top three of the Fortune Global 500, sometimes surpassing Amazon in revenue. They power the most populous nation on earth, which gives them a level of "bigness" that's hard to wrap your head around.
What This Means for Your Wallet
So, we’ve established that Walmart is the revenue king but a market cap underdog. Why does that matter to you?
It matters because Walmart's sheer size gives it "monopsony" power—which is a fancy way of saying they are such a big buyer that they dictate what things cost. When Walmart tells a supplier they won't pay more than $2 for a box of detergent, that supplier usually has to find a way to make it happen or lose access to millions of customers.
This is the primary reason Walmart has been able to keep prices relatively stable even during weird inflationary periods. Their "bigness" is their primary weapon.
Actionable Insights for the Savvy Observer
If you’re tracking these companies for investment or just to understand the world, stop looking at just one number. To get the full picture of global corporate power, look at these three metrics:
- Revenue (The Walmart Metric): This shows how much "action" the company sees. High revenue means the company is deeply integrated into daily life.
- Market Cap (The Apple Metric): This shows where the world’s wealth is being bet. It’s a measure of future influence and perceived value.
- Net Income (The Saudi Aramco Metric): This is the "actual" money. Revenue is great, but if you spend $99 to make $100, you aren't nearly as powerful as the person who spends $10 to make $50.
Walmart’s dominance in the 2020s is a testament to the staying power of "stuff." Even in an era of AI and cloud computing, people still need bread, socks, and TVs. As long as we live in a physical world, Walmart will likely remain the largest company by revenue.
The best way to keep tabs on this is to check the Fortune Global 500 list which usually updates in August. It’s the gold standard for measuring the "revenue bigness" that Walmart dominates. If you see Amazon finally hop over Walmart in that specific list, you'll know a massive historical shift in the global economy has officially occurred. Until then, the crown stays in Bentonville.