Amazon hits $1 trillion value, soaring past Microsoft and Alphabet

Vaughn Highfield September 5, 2018

Amazon has become the second company in the world to cross the $1 trillion (£779.3bn) mark after Apple managed the feat last month.

Amazon hits $1 trillion value, soaring past Microsoft and Alphabet

On Tuesday evening UK time, Amazon’s shares rose as high as $2,050.50 (£1598.58), kicking it over the $1 trillion valuation line. By end of trading, however, Amazon had fallen back below the line as shares settled on $2,039.51 (£1,590.01).

Microsoft and Google parent company Alphabet were lined up to be potential second-place entrants in the race to $1 trillion, but with Amazon soaring past both companies in record time does make sense.

As the New York Times points out, 49% of every dollar spent online in the US is spent with Amazon. It has over 550,000 employees and generates a whopping $178 billion (£138.8bn) in annual revenue. Amazon also runs a gigantic cloud computing platform that’s worth around $18 billion (£14bn) a year, supplying both small businesses and the likes of Netflix with infrastructure critical to their entire business models.

Amazon is also a company that dreams big. It’s moved from the likes of simply selling books online to becoming an integral part of people’s lives with the advent of Alexa and its Echo range of smart devices. It’s also a company that skirts with new ideas, launching next-day delivery services when nobody else offered such a thing, it played with the idea of drones long before they became commonplace and went head-to-head with Netflix and YouTube with Prime Video and its acquisition of Twitch.

Essentially, Amazon’s diversity and willingness to try out risky ideas in a way other companies aren’t – all while driving excitement in what it’s up to – is what caused its share price to briefly tip it over the $1 trillion mark. Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t known for paying its warehouse employees, so you also have to question if it really deserves such a valuation when it seemingly doesn’t value the people that make the whole service work.

It’s expected that Amazon has something else up its sleeve soon as the company has removed the Echo Show from sale everywhere. This, combined with the slow burn of interest around the company, should see it go back over the $1 trillion line very soon – in which case you have to start wondering if it’s Amazon or Apple who will reach the $2 trillion mark first.