Amazon is now bigger than Wal-Mart

Amazon published its second quarter financials late on Thursday, and the unexpected results have moved the company above Walmart to become the largest US retailer. The digital store is now worth more than $250 billion, while its brick-and-mortar competitor is valued at $233.5 billion. Amazon reported that Amazon Web Services generated $1.8 billion in sales for Q2, up about 80 percent from the $1 billion it brought in a year earlier. This increase helped the company achieve a profit of $92 million, a turnaround from the $126 million loss it made during the same period last year. Revenue grew by 20 percent overall, to $23.16 billion. Q2 marks the second quarter in which Amazon has released specific results for its cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing and storage space for businesses to save data and run systems, eradicating the need to build data centers and servers costing hundreds of millions.