Walmart said 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.
Rainey 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. Inflation at Walmart in the U.S. in the fourth quarter was just above 1%, with slightly lower inflation for food and 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 up about 2% in morning trading Thursday.
Yet as of Wednesday’s close, shares of the company have climbed about 22% over the past year and roughly 14% so far this year. That’s outpaced the S&P 500′s 12% gain over the past year and less than 1% rise 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 company 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…
Read More: Walmart (WMT) Q4 2026 earnings
