Walmart Is Now a $1 Trillion Company. If You'd Invested $100 into Its IPO, Here's How Much You'd Have Today

Walmart's (NASDAQ: WMT) stock terms is up astir 15% successful 2026 truthful far, arsenic enthusiasm astir the company's increasing e-commerce conception and investments successful artificial quality assistance propulsion the banal higher. On Tuesday, Feb. 3, its marketplace capitalization deed $1 trillion, making it the archetypal "brick and mortar" retailer to execute this status.

I enactment "brick and mortar" successful quotes due to the fact that it's nary coincidence that Walmart is joining an exclusive nine that is dominated by tech giants. In caller years, Walmart's dense investments successful e-commerce and AI technologies person made it, effectively, a tech stock. Yet earlier it reinvented itself, Walmart encountered unsmooth patches that made its banal trajectory rocky, albeit meteoric.

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Founder Sam Walton launched the archetypal Walmart store successful Rogers, Arkansas, successful 1962, aft being incapable to person his erstwhile partners to hold to a cost-cutting strategy. His mentation that little prices would pb to overmuch larger sales, and yet greater profits, resonated particularly good successful agrarian areas wherever fewer retailers bothered to operate. Six years later, Walmart expanded to Missouri and Oklahoma, and successful 1969, it went nationalist astatine a split-adjusted IPO terms of $0.0027 per share.

In the 30 years aft its October 1969 IPO, Walmart's stock terms surged 591,400% arsenic its store locations grew exponentially. In 1974, it paid its archetypal dividend, and has accrued payouts each twelvemonth since, a 52-year streak that makes it a uncommon Dividend King.

Yet this seemingly unstoppable juggernaut was caught flat-footed by the e-commerce revolution. According to 1 erstwhile squad leader, its CEO successful the precocious 1990s dismissed the thought of e-commerce, saying that Walmart's azygous apical store would ever make much income than the Internet.

From January 2000 to January 2013, the stock terms remained fundamentally flat, arsenic the company's slowness to accommodate created an opening for e-commerce elephantine Amazon. Since then, the stock terms has much than quintupled arsenic the institution ramped up its e-commerce level and investments successful AI technology.

Walmart's banal IPO'd astatine $16.50 a share. That $100 would bargain you 6.06 shares backmost then. When you origin successful the 12 banal splits since the IPO, those 6.06 shares would person grown to astir 37,236 shares contiguous (rounding to the nearest full share). Multiply those 37,236 shares by the existent stock terms ($128), and your $100 concern is present worthy astir $4,766,208. That's without dividends reinvested.