Amazon was the first online retailer to surpass a $1 trillion market capitalization in 2018.
Amazon crossed the $1 trillion mark during trading on 4 September 2018, about a month after Apple achieved the milestone. The company’s shares had risen sharply as investors valued its expanding retail, logistics, advertising, and cloud-computing businesses.
Amazon began as an online bookstore in 1994 and gradually expanded into a broad marketplace. Amazon Web Services became a particularly important source of operating profit and a major reason investors viewed the company as more than a retailer.
Amazon’s milestone is sometimes described simply as a technology-company record because its businesses span software and infrastructure. It remains a retailer as well as a cloud provider, but the phrase “online retailer” highlights the company’s original and still important consumer-commerce identity.