Just one month after Apple crossed the $1 trillion market value threshold, Amazon became only the second U.S. company to achieve, if only briefly, the remarkable feat. On Tuesday, September 4th, the e-commerce behemoth joined the ultra-exclusive 13-digit dollar club, otherwise consisting of PetroChina and Apple, after its stock rose to an all-time high of $2,050.50.
Marrian Zhou of Cnet reports that its stock “needed to reach $2,050.27 to cross the trillion-dollar threshold, based on the count of 487,741,189 shares from Amazon’s most recent quarterly report in July.”
Since 1994, the year of Amazon’s inception, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has spuriously led the company to not only achieve but also surpass, his lofty vision and ambition of it taking on brick-and-mortar bookstores, forever revolutionizing the landscape of retail. Since the rise of Amazon, many physical locations of bookstore chains such as Borders, Books-a-Million, and Barnes & Noble have closed their doors.
Amazon had a large part in helping to foster the technological power shift from physical retail to digital in the past few decades, and clearly the company remains at the forefront of the sector in this present day with all signs pointing to it remaining there for decades more to come. Currently, Amazon employs over 550,000 people and generates $178 billion in annual revenue. Serving as further proof of the company’s magnitude is the fact that it presently captures 49 cents of every e-commerce dollar in the United States and it is on track to capture almost half of the e-commerce market in America by the end of this year (2018), that is a little over 5% of all retail spend worldwide. Again, a remarkable feat.
As TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney reports, “While Apple’s market cap growth over the past year has been near a staggering 40 percent, Amazon has been even more of a value rocket ship. As of Tuesday, it’s market cap represented nearly 110 percent year-over-year growth.” Retail is not the only thing that has caused Amazon to achieve the trillion-dollar milestone, however.
Amazon has proven not to be a one-trick pony, so to speak, although that wouldn’t have been bad at all considering that the realization of Bezos’ initial goal for Amazon is impressive in and of itself. But instead, Bezos has led the company to higher heights by pioneering in several other sectors outside of retail and e-commerce.
According to Sara Salinas of CNBC:
Analysts cite the company’s ever-diversifying portfolio as a value driver. Last year, Amazon launched into the grocery industry with its purchase of Whole Foods Markets. It is rounding out its hardware and logistics segments with last-mile deliveries, and it’s pushing forward in advertising to challenge Facebook and Google.
“They have given investors confidence that they can go and disrupt markets just like they’ve done with retail,” Loup Ventures’ Gene Munster told CNBC’s Squawk Alley after the milestone stock move.
Amazon has posted particularly impressive growth in Amazon Web Services. The business segment grew nearly 50 percent in the second quarter. “Yes, Amazon did really well in online retail, but then the stock gapped up when they showed that they could become successful in cloud,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney told CNBC. “It’s almost like the ticker changed from AMZN to AWS.”
