Walmart said on Thursday that holiday-quarter sales rose nearly 6% and its quarterly earnings and revenue surpassed Wall Street’s expectations as gains in e-commerce, advertising and its third-party marketplace boosted its business.
For the full current fiscal year, Walmart said it expects net sales to increase by 3.5% to 4.5% and adjusted earnings per share to range from $2.75 to $2.85. That earnings outlook fell short of Wall Street’s expectations of $2.96 per share, according to LSEG.
In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said speedy deliveries from stores are helping Walmart attract more shoppers, particularly those with higher incomes.
“Our ability to serve customers at the scale that we have, combined with the speed that we now have, is really translating into continued market share gains,” he said.
He said the company’s market share gains cut across all incomes, but were larger among upper-income households. For example, with fashion, a category that grew by a mid-single digit percentage in the fourth quarter, almost all of that increase came from households with an annual income over $100,000, he said.
In the coming months, Rainey said he expects price increases from inflation and President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes to ease. Food inflation at Walmart in the fourth quarter was just above 1%, while it was slightly higher for general merchandise, he said.
“It seems to be a little bit more of a normalized price environment,” he said. “I think we have, largely as a retail industry, absorbed or seen the brunt of the impact from tariffs.”
While that comment is welcome news to many U.S. shoppers who buy at the country’s largest grocer, it may be too early to say what pricing trends at the retailer mean for the rest of the economy. Though Walmart is viewed as a key barometer for the wider retail industry, it traditionally has had more power than its competitors to keep prices low in part because of its scale.
Here is what the big-box retailer reported for the fiscal fourth quarter compared with Wall Street’s estimates, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 74 cents adjusted vs. 73 cents expected
- Revenue: $190.66 billion vs. $190.43 billion expected
Shares of Walmart were down about 3% in premarket trading.
Yet as of Wednesday’s close, shares of the company have climbed about 22% over the past year and about 14% so far this year. That’s outpaced the S&P 500′s 12% gains over the past year and less than 1% gains year to date.
Walmart’s results Thursday also show an inflection point in the industry. For the first time, Amazon topped Walmart as the largest retailer by annual revenue, as the company posted $716.9 billion in sales for its most recent fiscal year compared with $713.2 billion for Walmart.
The companies aren’t an exact comparison, as Amazon gets a sizeable piece of its revenue from cloud computing and other tech services. Yet it underscores the competition between the two rivals, particularly as Walmart follows a similar playbook by growing revenue streams outside of brick-and-mortar retail, like from ads and its marketplace.
In the three-month period that ended Jan. 31, Walmart’s net income decreased to $4.24 billion, or 53 cents per share, compared to $5.25 billion, or 65 cents per share, in the year-ago period.
Excluding one-time items like investment gains and losses, legal settlements and business reorganization, Walmart’s adjusted earnings per share were 74 cents.
Revenue rose from $180.55 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Comparable sales jumped 4.6% for Walmart’s U.S. business and 4% for Sam’s Club in the fourth quarter, excluding fuel, compared with the year-ago period. The industry metric, also called same-store sales, includes sales from stores and clubs open for at least a year.
Walmart’s e-commerce sales in the U.S. rose 27% compared with the year-ago period, fueled by store-fulfilled pickup and delivery of online orders,, along with the retailer’s third-party marketplace. That marked the company’s 15th straight quarter of double-digit digital gains. Global e-commerce sales increased 24% year over year.
For the company’s U.S. business, e-commerce accounted for 23% of sales – a record high for Walmart. The digital growth in the quarter included an approximately 50% gain in store-fulfilled deliveries and a roughly 41% increase in sales from Walmart Connect, its advertising business, the company said.
Walmart’s quarterly report marked the first under its new CEO John Furner. Furner, the former Walmart U.S. CEO and a more than three-decade company veteran, succeeded Doug McMillon as Walmart’s top executive on Feb. 1.
Investors largely expect Furner to focus on similar priorities as his predecessor McMillon, such as increasing Walmart’s online business, attracting more customers across incomes and ramping up higher-margin businesses like its third-party marketplace and advertising.
Along with getting a new CEO, Walmart has hit other milestones lately. Its stock switched to the tech-heavy Nasdaq in December and its market value hit $1 trillion earlier this month.
Along with its results Thursday, Walmart also announced a new $30 billion share repurchase authorization, replacing a $20 billion buyback program approved in 2022.
As of Wednesday’s close, shares of the company have climbed about 22% over the past year and about 14% so far this year. That’s outpaced the S&P 500′s 12% gains over the past year and less than 1% gains year to date.
