13 Figures (Hunter Field Editor’s Note)

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A group of colleagues last week discussed the difficulty of conceptualizing a trillion of anything. The following day, Walmart eclipsed $1 trillion in market share for the first time.

What a remarkable achievement for Arkansas’ corporate crown jewel, which joins only a handful of companies to have achieved the 13-figure mark.

It is the first traditional retailer to reach that market cap, joining mostly tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia.

The accomplishment is impressive on its face, but I think it can and should be appreciated even more when you consider where Walmart started, where it found itself a decade ago, and where it is moving. Walmart did more than just grow; it reinvented itself into something fundamentally different.

Sam Walton built the business on real estate development, distribution efficiency, vertical integration and everyday low prices. Now, the company is being valued like a technology company. When Walmart moved its stock listing to the Nasdaq in December, it was more than a symbolic move hinting that top executives wanted to be considered a tech company. Indeed, Walmart’s advertising revenue, data analytics and marketplace fees now matter as much to its business model as selling groceries.

What a transformation.

A decade ago, Walmart’s competitive advantage was ruthless supply chain management and the ability to strong-arm suppliers on price. Today, it’s selling those same suppliers targeted advertising space and premium placement in search results. Walmart essentially built an Amazon inside of Walmart — except with 4,600 brick-and-mortar stores providing the same-day delivery infrastructure Amazon had to construct from scratch. (And sometimes, as with a Little Rock Amazon facility, failing to build a structure that meets code. We’re still awaiting word on when that facility will come back online and return jobs to the thousands of displaced workers.)

I can personally attest to the success of Walmart’s reinvigorated e-commerce strategy. As someone who lives in a rural area, I have found that Walmart’s home delivery has become far more reliable than Amazon, which now regularly fails to live up to its long-time Prime promise of two-day shipping.

In 2016, Walmart’s market value was just $212 billion, but it has invested in all the right places, including automation, artificial intelligence and e-commerce, allowing accelerated revenue growth without ballooning expenses.

Last week’s trillion-dollar landmark is a nice early feather in the cap of new CEO John Furner, who took over as the top executive just two days earlier. Most of the credit, of course, goes to the man he succeeded, Doug McMillon. Furner’s challenge will be sustaining the trajectory and making the right adjustments as we plunge deeper into the era of artificial intelligence.

It’s a good reminder that we all ought to be constantly assessing our own businesses. Are we missing opportunities for reinvention that might take us to new heights?

Email Hunter Field, editor of Arkansas Business, at hfield@abpg.com