Amazon was the second company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization, doing so in September 2018 after Apple.
Amazon crossed the threshold on September 4, 2018, roughly one month after Apple reached it. The milestone reflected the rapid expansion of Amazon’s online retail operations, cloud-computing division, logistics network, advertising business, and subscription services.
Amazon began as an online bookseller in 1994 and gradually expanded into a broad marketplace. Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006, became especially important because it supplied computing and storage services to businesses, governments, and software developers.
A market-cap milestone does not mean that a company has that amount of cash or that its annual sales equal the figure. It represents the value investors assign to all outstanding shares at the current market price. Rankings can therefore change as shares rise or fall.