Amazon became the second company to surpass US$1 trillion in market value in 2018, after Apple.
Amazon crossed the threshold in September 2018, about a month after Apple reached the same milestone. Investors had increasingly valued Amazon not only as an online retailer but also for its cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, and its growing advertising business.
The company began as an online bookstore founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. It expanded into a broad marketplace, logistics network, entertainment provider, device maker, and cloud-services company. That diversification helped change how investors assessed its long-term growth potential.
Amazon’s market capitalization can differ from its sales ranking because market value reflects expectations about future profits and growth, not simply the amount of merchandise sold. Its shares trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker AMZN.