Amazon, with its online power, has grown even bigger than Walmart.

Amazon's market value surged past Walmart's in after-hours trading Thursday, fueled by an unprecedented lurch in the e-commerce giant's profits.

The company shocked Wall Street by posting net income of $92 million, or 19 cents a share — a dramatic rebuke to the skeptical analysts who predicted the company would lose 14 cents a share.

The report is a big improvement for Amazon after years of lukewarm profits. During the same quarter last year, the Seattle-based company netted a loss of $126 million, or 27 cents per share.

The performance was buoyed by Amazon's cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services, which clocked a $391 million profit and $1.8 billion revenue.

The news was enough to send Amazon soaring past Walmart's roughly $230 billion in value with a $30 billion jump to over $250 billion.

Walmart, the world's largest company by revenue, has long dominated the retail industry. The behemoth chain boasts more than 11,000 stores worldwide and over 2 million employees, making it the world's largest private employer.

The two companies openly competed last week for the retail crown with dueling sales when Amazon created "Prime Day" — a midsummer version of November's Black Friday. Walmart hit back with its own online sale, offering deep discounts on highly desirable gadgets like iPads.

Of course, an ebb in Amazon's stock could easily topple it from its new perch, but the upset signals the broader turning of tides to online retail.

For at least the past decade, Amazon has been notorious for coasting at the top of the online retail industry while turning slim profits.

"If you were to look at just the stock performance, you would think that Amazon was twice as lucrative as any other company," said Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali. "But it's not. It has some of the worst economics of any company."

Mulpuru-Kodali said Amazon does this by hunkering down on its research and development and spinning a public image as a bastion of innovation.

"I really believe that if every company in the world had the luxury of spending down its profit and calling it R&D, we would have colonized mars by now," Mulpuru-Kodali said.