Walmart (WMT) is scheduled to report their Q1 ’27 financial results before the opening bell on Thursday, May 21, ’26.<\/p>\n
Consensus sell-side expectations are for $174.95 billion in revenue, $7.75 billion in operating income and $0.66 in EPS for “expected” y-o-y growth of 5.6%, 8.8% and 8.2%.<\/p>\n
Last quarter – Q4 ’26 ended January ’26 – Walmart reported 5.6% revenue growth, 12% operating income growth and 12% EPS growth y-o-y.<\/p>\n
Morningstar’s analysis after the Feb ’27 earnings release had an interesting note: Global advertising now accounts for 25% of WMT’s total EBIT.<\/p>\n
Advertising was known to be growing at a 20% rate annually, but the fact that’s its now 20% of EBIT ( I still refer to it as operating income) was a positive surprise.<\/p>\n
Valuation is still the biggest so-called negative around Walmart when looking at general commentary. WMT is trading at roughly 46x expected ’27 earnings for 10% EPS growth this year, on 6% expected revenue growth. Price to sales is back up to 1.5x for WMT; WMT and COST for years had a price-to-sales or price-to-revenue below 1x, but that’s been put to rest with the Walmart rally since 2023.<\/p>\n
Summary: <\/strong><\/em>This is a short Walmart earnings preview, but the first since the Iran conflict started, and the price of WTI crude has regularly been over $100 per barrel. Like McDonald’s, Walmart does have a lower-end consumer as regular shoppers, but the fact is the mass-merchant retail giant has been attracting a higher demographic the last few years. One reason may be e-commerce: Walmart seems to have exploited a niche in “expedited delivery” (i.e. higher priced delivery cost for a product that is urgently needed) and it seems to be working.<\/p>\n Ecommerce grew 28% globally for WMT, and is now profitable at the Sam’s segment level.<\/p>\n If Walmart doesn’t lower guidance thanks to gas prices hitting some level of sales, at the very least expect Walmart to be conservative with guidance.<\/p>\n A 10% – 15% selloff in the stock would be perfect, but it may not happen given Walmart’s ability to execute quarter-in, and quarter-out.<\/p>\n This is Walmart’s first earnings report post the Iraq conflict.<\/p>\n Let’s see the impact – if any – the high gas prices have had.<\/p>\n The stock is up 20% YTD (Monday night,\u00a0 5\/18\/26 close.)<\/p>\n None of this is advice or a recommendation, but only an opinion. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.<\/p>\n Thanks for reading.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Walmart (WMT) is scheduled to report their Q1 ’27 financial results before the opening bell on Thursday, May 21, ’26.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wmt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19547"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19552,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19547\/revisions\/19552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fundamentalis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}