Walmart is basically a tech company now
After building up fast-growing e-commerce and advertising businesses, moving its stock to the Nasdaq, and, as of Tuesday, crossing $1 trillion in valuation, Walmart is starting to look a lot more like a big tech company.
Walmart’s market cap was $1.02 trillion at the end of the day Tuesday after its stock climbed more than 28% over the past year, according to CNBC. It joined the Nasdaq exchange, also home to technology companies like Amazon, in December. In the company’s third quarter, which ended in October, its global e-commerce business grew 27% year over year, with its Walmart Connect advertising business in the U.S. up 33%, according to its earnings release.
The valuation milestone further narrows the gap between Walmart and its biggest rival. Amazon’s market cap is $2.5 trillion, though the companies have become almost evenly matched on revenue in recent quarters. Walmart made $179.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter to Amazon’s $180.2 billion. As the companies have yet to report fourth-quarter earnings, it remains to be seen whether Amazon surpassed Walmart in full-year revenue.
Still, Walmart CFO John David Rainey said last year that moving to Nasdaq represented the company’s long-term, tech-focused strategy. A Walmart spokesperson declined to comment for this story, given that the company is in a quiet period ahead of its next earnings call on Feb. 19.
“Walmart is setting a new standard for omnichannel retail by integrating automation and AI to build smarter, faster and more connected experiences for customers, while enabling our associates to deliver even greater value at scale,” Rainey said in November.
The trillion-dollar valuation “really underscores a pretty important adjustment in Walmart strategy,” said Tomas Jandik, a corporate finance professor at the University of Arkansas Sam M. Walton College of Business — which is named after Walmart’s founder.
“Walmart really wants to see itself as a technology-driven company that happens to sell groceries and stocks, and not the other way around,” Jandik added. “People come for groceries, people buy socks, people buy TVs, everything in between, but what is really important is where the money that they are making is going and where the growth is coming from.”
Walmart has shifted away from growing solely by opening more and more stores; it now does so more through investments in technology and e-commerce. For example, Walmart in recent months has leaned into AI commerce partnerships with OpenAI and Google, allowing customers to shop for Walmart products within ChatGPT and Gemini.
“[With] what they’re learning with these new partnerships, how they’re leaning into innovation, how commerce is being reinvented, they’re on the forefront of agentic commerce,” said Barry Thomas, senior retail thought leader for Kantar. “They just behave and act like a tech company.”
Further, Walmart has promoted executives who have been central to its tech advancements, such as now-CEO John Furner, Walmart U.S. president and CEO David Guggina, and chief growth officer Seth Dallaire.
Thomas — a former Coca-Cola executive — said brands are making big investments in selling at Walmart in part because of how they can leverage the retailer’s tech stack. Walmart’s retail media offerings offer closed-loop attribution to directly correlate campaigns to sales performance. Its Scintilla data insights platform can help brands develop new products and better promotions. That creates a challenge for other retailers with smaller flywheels.
“If you’re like a Kroger or a Target, how do you compete with Walmart and Amazon and Costco? Most clients want to talk to me about the big three,” Thomas said. “If you don’t win with the big three, you really don’t win. Brands like Coca-Cola and others are pouring dollars into the winners disproportionately.”
Jandik said Walmart joining Nasdaq was the company saying it wants investors to recognize that it has massively invested in technology, automation and e-commerce over the past decade. Nasdaq is a younger exchange known for more tech-focused companies.
“The Walmart of the last 40 years was a value, discount-driven retailer that had its place on the New York Stock Exchange. … It was getting its valuation as a very old, established company with low growth,” Jandik said. “Walmart wants to signal that they are [a major investor] in new technologies.”