Amazon and Walmart, with more than a trillion dollars in annual revenues combined, are the two largest
companies in the world. They have not only redefined the retail industry—Walmart in the 1980s/1990s and
Amazon since 2000—but have also been the benchmark for best practices in business (in terms of the use of
IT, supply chain, data analytics and customer orientation).
In the coming years, Amazon will probably dethrone Walmart as the world’s largest company, a position
that Walmart has occupied for more than two decades. By examining these two companies and their
business models in depth, Nirmalya Kumar elucidates the more general phenomenon of incumbents competing with disruptors (e.g., Volkswagen vs Tesla, Marriott vs Airbnb) as well as the move to omnichannel retail, where physical stores must coexist with online retailers.
Clash is a lucid, well-researched and eminently readable discourse on the future of retailing, the economics of e-commerce delivery models and whether its two largest players will collide head-on or coexist in
strategic complementarity.