Amazon was the first company identified with online retail to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization.
Amazon crossed the $1 trillion mark during trading on September 4, 2018. The achievement came more than two decades after the company began as an online bookstore and expanded into a broad marketplace for products and services.
Amazon Web Services was a major part of the company’s transformation. Launched in 2006, AWS became a leading cloud-computing business and supplied a highly profitable counterweight to the lower-margin retail operation. Advertising, subscriptions, devices, and logistics also broadened Amazon’s business.
Amazon’s milestone is sometimes attributed to Alibaba because Alibaba is another enormous internet-commerce company. However, Amazon reached the trillion-dollar market-cap level first among the two, during its 2018 share-price surge.