Amazon Becomes the Second U.S. Company to Hit $1 Trillion Market Valuation

Just five weeks after Apple made history by becoming the first publicly traded U.S. company to hit a $1 trillion market cap, Amazon has today become the second publicly traded U.S. company to reach the milestone valuation. According to CNBC, Amazon’s stock has gained more than 70% in 2018 and has more than doubled in the last 12 months.

Shares of the e-commerce giant rose nearly 2 percent to a high of $2,050.50 in morning trading. The stock needed a price of $2,050.27 to reach the $1 trillion mark, based on an outstanding count of 487,741,189 shares in the company’s most recent quarterly report in July. By early afternoon Tuesday, the stock was at $2,035.64.

“They have given investors confidence that they can go and disrupt markets just like they’ve done with retail,” Loup Ventures’ Gene Munster told CNBC.

Analysts believe the retail giant’s ever-diversifying portfolio is its main value driver. Amazon launched into the grocery industry with its purchase of Whole Foods Markets last year. At the same time, it is rounding out its hardware and logistics segments with last-mile deliveries and is also pushing in advertising to challenge the likes of Google and Facebook.

“Yes, Amazon did really well in online retail, but then the stock gapped up when they showed that they could become successful in the cloud,” said RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney. “It’s almost like the ticker changed from AMZN to AWS.”

At its peak earlier today, Amazon’s stock had picked up $72 billion in market value, an increase that is larger than the market value of more than 80% of S&P 500 constituents and is roughly the size of Starbucks.