World’s most valuable retail companies

As Alibaba has struggled with the Chinese government and Walmart has remained rather steady in it’s market value, Home Depot has become world’s most valued retailer after Amazon.

One can talk about Amazon as an outlier. With valuations approaching two trillion USD, it is in the league of its own. After the highly profitable growth of AWS and the explosive growth of Amazon Ads, Amazon has it’s market cap by 485% since 2015!

Amazon is as valuable as the seven next companies combined.

For a long time Alibaba and Walmart have been clearly the second and third most valuable companies in the world. However, during the last years Home Depot has had a spectacular run of growing market capitalisation and it has reached the second after growing by 50% only this year. Also Home Depot’s main competitor Lowe’s has been growing its market cap, not just as fast as Home Depot. Lowe’s is world’s fifth most valuable retailer.

Other retailers fast growth in market capitalisation are Costco and Chinese JD.com. Costco has grown its market cap by 232% since 2015 and JD by 218%.

The most valuable retailers are mainly based in the US with two companies coming from China and only one from Europe as Inditex remains on the tenth spot.

In terms of the sales channel, the list of most valuable retailers is still a playground for the store based retailers. Seven out of ten companies are fundamentally Bricks and mortar retailers with some or little online activity. Alongside Amazon, the Chinese online giants Alibaba and JD are also online retailers.

However, the behind the top 10 retailers there are several rising online retailers that will eventually break into the top 20 or even the top 10. Companies like Pinduoduo (#11), Coupang (#18), Wayfair (#29), Zalando (#33) and others will be growing rapidly in the future also.

Two interesting companies that would be high on the list, but are not counted as retailers are Nike and Shopify.

Nike, which has already 35+% of revenue coming from their own direct channels, would have been fifth most valuable retailer and Shopify would have been on sixth position, if it would have been counted as a retailer.