Amazon is the company that owns the online retail platform Amazon and is commonly ranked among the world’s largest companies by market capitalization.
Amazon began as an online bookstore founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. It expanded into a broad marketplace selling many categories of goods, while also building major businesses in cloud computing, advertising, logistics, entertainment, and consumer devices.
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is especially important to the company’s financial profile. AWS provides computing, storage, databases, and other infrastructure services to organizations around the world. Its profitability and growth have helped make Amazon a recurring member of the highest-valued public companies.
Amazon’s market capitalization is determined by its share price and shares outstanding, not simply by the amount of merchandise sold. That distinction matters because Amazon’s retail revenue is enormous, while its cloud and advertising operations contribute differently to profit and valuation.