--- title: "Walmart's growth slows, highlighting Amazon's competitive advantage" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/296577809.md" description: "Walmart's same-store sales in the U.S. declined in the second quarter, with its stock price plummeting 9%, highlighting its slowing growth. In contrast, Amazon's retail business grew at a rate of 14%-15%, three times that of Walmart, and its e-commerce revenue is more than three times that of Walmart. Although Walmart's e-commerce growth is relatively fast, it is constrained by the high proportion of physical stores, resulting in overall weak growth and a significant gap in competitive advantage compared to Amazon" datetime: "2026-08-21T06:50:15.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/296577809.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/296577809.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/296577809.md) generator: "portal-rs" --- # Walmart's growth slows, highlighting Amazon's competitive advantage Walmart announced that in the second fiscal quarter ending in July, same-store sales at its U.S. locations declined; despite a 23% growth in its e-commerce business, its stock price still plummeted by 9%. Objectively speaking, this performance is actually quite acceptable, but there is one undeniable fact: Walmart is already a mature company. Even with the support of e-commerce and advertising businesses, its revenue can only achieve about 5% growth each year. What this financial report truly reveals is how outstanding Amazon's retail business performance is in comparison. Wall Street's attention is mostly focused on its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), especially now that artificial intelligence further amplifies the importance of cloud computing in the tech industry, which is easily overlooked. If we exclude AWS, Amazon's retail and supporting businesses (including advertising) can achieve an annual growth rate of 14%-15%. Although this is not the rocket-speed growth expected by tech companies, for a company that has been established for 30 years, such performance is quite impressive, with a growth rate three times that of Walmart. Of course, directly comparing the retail revenue growth rates of Amazon and Walmart is somewhat unfair. Over 75% of Walmart's approximately $700 billion annual revenue comes from traditional brick-and-mortar stores; whereas physical business accounts for less than 4% of Amazon's retail revenue. In the e-commerce sector, Walmart is a latecomer, and its e-commerce business growth rate exceeds that of Amazon. It is noteworthy that although Amazon has developed more maturely in the online shopping field, the relative growth rate difference in e-commerce business between the two companies is not as significant as one might imagine. Including advertising, Amazon's e-commerce segment revenue is more than three times that of Walmart. Excluding Amazon's smaller physical store business, its global retail business grew by 16.3% year-on-year in the second quarter, with a growth rate of 14.2% in the first quarter. Amazon adjusted its Prime Day promotion from the third quarter to the second quarter, boosting this quarter's performance. In comparison, Walmart's e-commerce business grew by 23% in the second quarter, down from 26% in the first quarter. If Walmart and Amazon maintain their current growth rates, in due time, Walmart's online retail scale is expected to catch up with Amazon, although this process will take a long time. However, it is almost impossible for the growth rates of both companies to remain constant. As their scales continue to expand, Walmart's e-commerce business growth rate is likely to slow down, gradually converging towards Amazon's growth rate level. At the same time, Amazon is experiencing strong momentum in advertising and other sectors, and its Prime Video streaming service is likely to grow into a powerful force. Indeed, Walmart's advertising business is growing slightly faster, and it has even acquired companies like Vizio to strengthen its layout. However, Walmart lacks a streaming service like Prime Video, and its e-commerce platform is smaller, making it very challenging for its advertising business to catch up with Amazon. 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