Amazon surpasses Walmart in quarterly revenue

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Payne Capital Management President Ryan Payne explains why tech earnings remain strong despite a recent dip and how AI hiring could help offset a wave of baby boomer retirements on ‘Mornings with Maria’. foxbusiness.com

Exterior view showing the Amazon logo mounted on the building housing the company’s German headquarters in Munich. foxbusiness.com

Amazon Prime delivery person foxbusiness.com

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. foxbusiness.com

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Amazon has finally done what every retail analyst has been predicting for years: it overtook Walmart in quarterly revenue. According to The Hill, Amazon reported $187.8 billion in sales for the quarter, edging past Walmart’s $180.6 billion and making Amazon the world’s largest company by revenue—at least by that narrow metric.

The timing is almost too neat. While celebrating a “top line” milestone, Amazon is also cutting staff in one of the most expensive labor markets in the US. Fox Business, citing the New York Post and state WARN-style filings, reports that roughly 135 corporate employees at Amazon’s 1440 Broadway office in Manhattan were laid off in January, with more New York-based cuts expected to appear in state records. These reductions are part of a broader restructuring Amazon announced last month: about 16,000 roles eliminated companywide, following roughly 14,000 corporate cuts in October.

The company’s public rationale is the usual management catechism: “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” as Amazon HR executive Beth Galetti put it, while continuing to invest heavily in artificial intelligence. Reuters estimates, relayed by Fox Business, suggest the recent cuts amount to nearly 10% of Amazon’s corporate workforce—still a small slice of its 1.58 million total employees, most of whom work in warehouses and delivery.

The more interesting story is what the revenue crown actually means. Walmart’s business is built on low-margin physical retail at enormous scale; Amazon’s revenue now bundles together first-party retail, third-party marketplace services, Prime subscriptions, advertising, and—critically—AWS. Amazon can win the “sales” headline while relying on higher-margin segments to subsidize the logistical machine that makes those sales possible.

That’s why headcount becomes an optimization variable the moment investors start asking about operating income rather than revenue. CEO Andy Jassy has been explicit about the direction of travel. Fox Business quotes Jassy saying in June that AI will create some new jobs but “we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” and that Amazon expects AI-driven efficiency to reduce its corporate workforce over the next few years.

For a company that sells itself as a frictionless marketplace, the message is blunt: scale doesn’t remove constraints; it just moves them. When margins are thin and capital is expensive, the fastest “innovation” is often a spreadsheet that decides which humans are now overhead.