The numbers
38%: Global ad revenue growth during the second quarter.
43%: U.S. growth of Walmart Connect, the company’s retail media arm, during the period, excluding Vizio.
$187.9 billion: Total revenue, representing a 5.9% lift year over year, and beating an S&P Capital IQ projection of $186.8 billion.
23%: Growth in global ecommerce sales from the same period last year. In the U.S., growth was 24%.
$0.81: Adjusted earnings per share, outpacing Wall Street estimates of $0.74.
The watercooler talk
The company raised its guidance on sales and earnings Thursday, after reporting a booming ecommerce business, high profit growth, and tailwinds from tariff refunds totaling $2.9 billion. It now expects full-year adjusted earnings to be &2.80-$2.87 per share, up from $2.75-$2.85.
Key to the retailer’s growth has been its advertising and integrated platform approach.
Walmart closed its acquisition of self-serve connected TV (CTV) platform Vibe.co earlier this month. The deal, reportedly valued at $1.4 billion, combined with Walmart’s 2024 takeover of Vizio, is expected to make the retailer a more formidable rival in TV streaming against Amazon (whose ads business raked in $76 billion in the last 12 months). The area has been a key focus for Walmart, as CEO John Furner indicated earlier this year. Now, Walmart will fold Vibe into Walmart Connect, its retail media arm, extending its first-party commerce data and measurement into streaming while also making CTV more accessible to smaller advertisers.
Walmart’s wider ads business, the centerpiece of which is Walmart Connect, is flourishing. Ad revenue grew almost 40% for the quarter.
The spike “gives us confidence and the ability to maybe see incremental margins even go higher,” said chief financial officer John David Rainey. “What do you have to believe to have incremental margins go higher? Well, advertising growth would need to outpace our ecommerce, growth, and that’s actually what we’ve been seeing, and not by a small margin—by a large margin, on a larger base.”
At Cannes in June, Walmart spelled out its vision for a unified global commerce machine that brings together in-store experiences, ecommerce, marketplaces, offsite media, membership, and CTV, all under the oversight of the company’s chief growth officer Seth Dallaire. The pitch that Walmart is making is, essentially, ‘We have data across the entire shopping journey, both online and offline, so you, advertiser, should buy our ads, our signals, and our measurement.’
