Walmart joins $1 trillion market cap club

Walmart crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold on Tuesday after a dizzying stock climb fueled by the growth of digital businesses and the acquisition of new customers.

In hitting the benchmark, the largest U.S. retailer and grocer joins an exclusive club made up almost entirely of technology companies.

Shares closed nearly 3% higher at $127.71, leaving the company with a $1.02 trillion market cap at the end of Tuesday.

According to Al Jazeera and CNBC, Walmart, which has 11,000 stores in 19 countries, joins a slate of nine corporate giants in the so-called trillion dollar club, including Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft, among others. Amazon is the only other retailer that has broken the barrier and is now valued at $2.6 trillion.

Trade deal bump

On Monday, United States President Donald Trump announced a trade deal with India that would slash tariffs to 18% from 50% and that impacts Walmart, which has strategically shifted supply chain operations to India and away from China.

On Tuesday, in an interview with CNBC, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that the White House is still ironing out the details of the deal, but that still hasn’t slowed Walmart’s stock from popping on the looming deal.

“We have an announcement of an India deal, but still no timeline about when it comes into effect and whether the secondary tariffs, the 25% linked to India’s purchase of Russian oil, when those would be removed, so I think there’s still a lot of questions,” economist Rachel Ziemba, founder of Ziemba Insights, told Al Jazeera.

While there are limited details on the specifics of the deal, markets are responding to tariffs likely to come down.

“Markets are, of course, forward-looking. I think this sort of reinforces a view in the marketplace that incremental tariffs will be less this year,” Ziemba said.

The big box retailer jumped from 2% of its global exports coming from India in 2018 to 25% in 2023, according to a Reuters review of import data in 2023. Walmart hopes to source $10 billion in goods from India by next year.