After Apple, Amazon hits $1 tn in valuation
Amazon.com Inc. shares rose as much as 1.9%, pushing the company briefly beyond a market value of $1 trillion, a milestone Apple Inc. reached last month.
It’s an historic accomplishment for chief executive officer Jeff Bezos, who founded the company in his Seattle garage in 1994 as a small online book seller. Now Bezos is the world’s wealthiest person, running a diversified global enterprise with more than $200 billion in annual sales and more than 575,000 employees.
While Amazon has come a long way from its humble beginnings, things moved fast particularly in the past few years. The shares have more than tripled since 2015, reaching a high of $2,050.50 Tuesday. After crossing the $1 trillion mark, Amazon’s valuation slipped to $988.8 billion at 12.27pm in New York. Tech competitors Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are closing in too.
Apple and Amazon aren’t the first trillion-dollar corporations. Energy company PetroChina Co. briefly crossed that valuation in late 2007 but slumped quickly as oil prices collapsed in the financial crisis. Still, the online retailer is among the most feared and menacing competitors across a broad swathe of industries. Just a hint of Amazon’s potential interest in a new business can send stocks tumbling.
Moving well beyond books, Bezos re-imagined the retail experience, seeing early on how the internet could connect shoppers with a selection of goods far larger than they’d find on shelves in nearby stores. He expanded the business from books to music and movies, then added toys and electronics.
In 2001, Amazon launched an online marketplace, looking to expand inventory more quickly by inviting independent merchants onto the site and charging them a commission on each sale. The marketplace now accounts for more than half of all goods sold on the site.