Thriving Amazon overtakes Microsoft

In Amazon’s latest conquest, the company has toppled Microsoft to become the third most valuable company in the world.

The online retailer’s market capitalisation has reached US$702.5 billion (NZ$953b), enough to top its Seattle-area neighbour for the first time. Microsoft’s market value stands at US$699.2b.

Amazon trails only Apple, worth US$849.2b, and Google parent Alphabet, at US$746b, among publicly traded companies.

Amazon has nearly quadrupled in value over the last three years, a surge that made founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos the world’s richest man, displacing his Medina neighbour, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.

The gains came as investors bet that the company would continue its track record of grabbing an ever larger share of commerce. Amazon’s revenue has grown by at least 19 per cent each year for the past decade.

In 21 years Amazon has gone from upstart online bookseller to one of the world’s dominant hightech firms. Its shares surged on their first day of public trading in May 1997, valuing the company at US$560 million.

Microsoft then was a US$140b giant, dominant in the fastgrowing personal computer market. But the company’s value tumbled by nearly two thirds in the next year amid a broad rout in technology shares.

Amazon, which made deep cuts to survive the bursting internet bubble, spent the same period laying the groundwork for its domination of online retail.

-MCT