A 10-Year-Old Acquisition Is Finally Paying off Big for Walmart. Should Amazon Investors Be Worried?

In August 2016, Walmart (WMT +0.58%) paid $3.3 billion for Jet.com, the largest e-commerce acquisition ever at the time. Wall Street was skeptical. Jet was barely a year old, hemorrhaging cash monthly, and had never turned a profit.Walmart's own e-commerce sales had grown just 0.4% the prior quarter, while Amazon (AMZN 3.89%) was posting $21 billion in quarterly e-commerce revenue. The gap felt insurmountable. Walmart shut down the Jet.com brand in 2020. Most people filed that as a $3.3 billion write-off. T ...