Amazon has become the second company to be valued by Wall Street at $1tn, a matter of weeks after Apple reached the milestone first.
Today, a rise in the share price of Amazon, which is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US, briefly took it above the trillion-dollar watermark for the first time. The company’s value hovered just shy of $1tn before noon.
Amazon went public at $18 a share in 1997 - on Tuesday those shares hit $2,050, pushing the value of the whole company over $1tn.
Founded by businessman Jeff Bezos in Seattle, Washington, in 1994, less than 25 year later, the company has garnered a major presence in everything from retail, to groceries, to video streaming, helping it achieve revenues of $178bn last year.
Bezos became the world’s richest man in the process, with a net worth estimated at more than $167bn on Tuesday, according to Forbes.
Amazon Web Services is currently the front runner for a $10bn contract to provide cloud computing for the US department of defence.
US President Donald Trump has threatened a wider investigation into Amazon’s dominance in online retail. The company accounts for 49 cents out of every e-commerce dollar spent in the United States and has been blamed for the failure of once powerful retailers such as Tots R Us.
The company is currently conducting assessments of where to build a second headquarters in the US, dubbed HQ2. The massive complex is expected to add 50,000 jobs in the city that wins but also looks sure to come with similarly outsized tax breaks for the company.
RPA Perspective Amid the financial news, Amazon.com on Tuesday launched a Hindi version of its mobile website and app for Android smartphones in a bid to make deeper inroads into India’s fast-growing e-commerce market, stepping up its battle with Walmart’s Flipkart unit.
None of India’s other leading e-commerce portals - Flipkart, Snapdeal or Paytm Mall - currently have a local language version of their apps or websites, and the move to launch a Hindi app and website could give Amazon access to tens of millions of new customers in India’s small towns and villages.
“What we believe is, Amazon.in in Hindi is a critical step to actually address the next 100 million customers,” Manish Tiwary, Vice President, Category Management at Amazon India said at a news conference.
Amazon is looking to win over the next 100 million customers in the country, where the e-commerce market is tipped to grow to $200 billion in a decade, according to Morgan Stanley. Flipkart, along with its fashion units Myntra and Jabong, is slightly ahead of Amazon in India’s online retail, according to Forrester estimates.
Amazon also has plans to support more local Indian languages on its shopping app and mobile website and will also extend the service to mobile platforms beyond Android, said Kishore Thota, Amazon India’s head of customer experience and marketing, without giving a timeline.
