So Amazon is bigger than Walmart. When will Alibaba overtake Walmart? That will be the day, since there’ll be no help from cloud services
The surge added another $40 billion or so to Amazon’s market cap. That will almost assuredly propel it to be more valuable than Walmart for the first time when the stock market opens Friday, making this a deeply symbolic moment for e-commerce and the Internet. It is also a nice present for Amazon, which celebrated its 20th birthday last week.
“Holy cow, what a quarter,” said Jason Moser, an analyst with the Motley Fool website and an Amazon investor. “They blew that thing out of the water.”
Amazon’s second-quarter profit amounted to 19 cents a share. A year ago, the company lost 27 cents a share. Analysts had been predicting another loss of 13 cents.
Revenue was better than expected, too, up 20 percent to $23.2 billion. That was about $800 million more than forecast.
One big contribution to the improved profit and revenue was Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division whose numbers were broken out for the first time in the first quarter. A.W.S. is the undisputed leader in the sector, outdistancing both Microsoft and Google, but analysts had been wondering if price cuts would hamper growth.
2 Comments
Rokonuzzaman
This is a good example of taking advantage from economy of scope. High temporal variation of e-commerce platform demand,which picks up during x-mass, gave the opportunity of launching cloud services of unused facility, during most of the year. The rapid growth of bandwidth capacity at eroding price is accelerating the option of accessing enterprise grade computing facility of the west to other side of the glove, at a fraction of cost. Statistical multiplexing of global demand erodes cost of computing and storage, which opens new growth opportunities..public policy should take into consideration in devising national ICT policies to take advantage of such changes..
Rokonuzzaman
Due to variation in location, customer base and commodity it sales, I am not sure, whether Alibaba enjoys similar temporal variation of demand of its e-commerce platform as experienced by Amazon. If not so, Alibaba will not likely get, even wants to, the bump from cloud service, as it’s counter part got,to overtake Walmart…what is the likely alternate competitive advantage?
Sri Lanka at WAIC 2026: Aligning with a More Inclusive Vision for Global AI Governance
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2026 was held in Shanghai from 17–20 July and brought global attention to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as the increasingly important question of who gets to shape the rules governing it. This analysis examines the alignment between Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech and Sri Lanka’s Deputy Minister of Digital Economy Eng.
LIRNEasia Senior Research Manager Merl Chandana at NewsFirst Sri Lanka’s Face To Face Programme
LIRNEasia Senior Research Manager and Team Lead for Data, Algorithms, and Policy (DAP), Merl Chandana, was interviewed on NewsFirst Sri Lanka’s Face to Face programme on 9 August 2026. The interview focused on the wonders and dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), covering a recent cybersecurity incident where an experimental agentic AI model developed by OpenAI was manipulated to execute multiple attacks on Hugging Face.
More Than a Wheelchair: The Case for Mobility That Actually Works
The economic exclusion faced by people with mobility disabilities in Sri Lanka is substantial. Although Sri Lanka has made genuine investments in this area, yet, for many wheelchair users, the journey to work, school, university or a vocational training center remains difficult.
Links
User Login
Themes
Social
Twitter
Facebook
RSS Feed
Contact
9A 1/1, Balcombe Place
Colombo 08
Sri Lanka
+94 (0)11 267 1160
+94 (0)11 267 5212
info [at] lirneasia [dot] net
Copyright © 2026 LIRNEasia
a regional ICT policy and regulation think tank active across the Asia Pacific