From the course: Accounting Foundations

Income statement example: Walmart's revenues

From the course: Accounting Foundations

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Income statement example: Walmart's revenues

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- Let's look at an actual income statement. This is the income statement for Walmart for the year ended January 31st, 2024. Remember that an income statement covers a period of time. This is an income statement for a one year or 12 month period. What we do when we look at an income statement is to look at two numbers first, the top one, sales, and the bottom one, net income. The top number here, sales is the total amount that Walmart sold to you and me and other people around the world during the year. $642.6 billion. By the way, that's the world record. No company in the history of the world has ever sold more than that in one year. No one is even close. By comparison, Apple sales during the same year were $391 billion, so that's Walmart's sales, $642.6 billion. Notice that Walmart has another way to generate assets in doing business. The $5.488 billion in other revenue, primarily Sam's Club's membership. Walmart's total revenue of $648 billion represents the total amount of assets generated by Walmart in doing business during the year. Now, take a quick look down at the bottom of Walmart's income statement. The bottom number here is called Consolidated net income attributable to Walmart. We have called this just net income. The number is $15.511 billion. That's the bottom line. You've heard of the bottom line, well, that's where the phrase bottom line comes from. By the way, you can sense that there is additional interesting stuff to learn here. For example, what does it mean when it says consolidated and what kind of net income reported in Walmart's income statement would not be attributable to Walmart? These are questions that you can explore through a more detailed course in accounting, but they are beyond the scope of our introduction here. The top line is sales. The bottom line is net income. Net income is the measure of economic performance for Walmart for the year ended January 31st, 2024. A good way to interpret the net income number is that Walmart generated economic value of $15.511 billion during the year. Not too bad.

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