Walmart, Amazon Top World’s Largest Retail Companies

While retail keeps changing, with several well-known names (Toys R Us, The Limited et al) filing for bankruptcy, some things stayed the same. Walmart, for instance, is still the biggest retailer in the world and #1 among retailers on the Forbes Global 2000 list, although it slipped slightly in the overall rankings to #24 from #17 in 2016. In 2017, the company continued its e-commerce acquisition drive (it famously bought Jet.com for $3 billion in 2016), buying, among other brands, men’s clothing seller Bonobos. Earlier this year, it signaled its plans to keep spending big, announcing its planned acquisition of Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company, for $16 billion. The Flipkart move has been interpreted as a pre-emptive strike against Wal-Mart’s number one rival, e-commerce behemoth Amazon, which moved up to #53 from #83 overall. Read more at Forbes.