Amazon owns the Amazon online marketplace and the Amazon Web Services cloud business.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. The company expanded into many retail categories, logistics, devices, streaming, and cloud computing. Amazon Web Services, commonly called AWS, provides computing, storage, databases, and other services to businesses and governments.
The combination of retail scale and cloud infrastructure helped Amazon become one of the world’s highest-valued public companies by market capitalization. AWS is especially important because cloud services have different economics from traditional retail and have become a major source of operating income for Amazon.
Amazon’s market capitalization is not the same as its annual sales. Market cap reflects the stock market’s valuation of the company, while revenue measures money generated by its businesses. Amazon’s shares trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker AMZN.