Amazon operates AWS and became a trillion-dollar company in 2018.
Amazon reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion in September 2018, shortly after Apple reached that milestone. The company’s rise was initially associated with online retail, but investors increasingly valued its cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, as well as advertising, logistics, subscriptions, and digital media.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. The business expanded rapidly into many product categories and built a large fulfillment network. AWS launched in 2006 and provides computing power, storage, databases, and other services to companies, governments, and developers.
Amazon’s trillion-dollar milestone demonstrates why market capitalization reflects expectations about future earnings as well as current sales. The company can report enormous revenue while its market value is influenced by profit margins, cloud growth, investment spending, and changing investor expectations.