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Walmart Inc., Amazon.com, and the Future...

Hou, Young, Kaloge...

Case

Walmart Inc., Amazon.com, and the Future of Retail

Hou, Young; Kalogeropoulos, Demitri; Sesia, Aldo

S-0459 | Published July 17, 2025 | 10 Pages Case

Collection: Darden School of Business

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Heading into the 2024 holiday season, Walmart Inc. (Walmart) and Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), were locked in a battle over global retailing dominance. As of mid-September 2024, Walmart was valued at $644 billion, while Amazon’s valuation approached $2 trillion. The e-commerce giant was the clear favorite among investors, at least following a period of surging growth and elevated enthusiasm for many tech stocks. That valuation gap reflected high expectations around Amazon’s earnings potential over the next several years. Some of that enthusiasm was tied to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud segment that had delivered much of the company’s profit gains in recent years. Still, many market watchers were excited about Amazon’s potential to mount a challenge to Walmart’s retail dominance. Walmart also saw opportunities to grow at Amazon’s expense. Walmart and Amazon both showed positive operating momentum as they approached the 2024 holiday shopping season, and observers were enthusiastic about both companies. Yet with Amazon and Walmart increasingly targeting some of the same sales niches, it seemed likely that their rivalry would only intensify over the coming years. At the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, this public-sourced case is taught in the second-year “Corporate Strategy” course.