Amazon becomes second trillion dollar company after Apple

amazon building

Amazon has become the second US company to be valued by Wall Street at $1 trillion, just a month after tech rival Apple.

Company's stocks rose to $2,050 a share on Tuesday, briefly pushing the tech giant above the trillion dollar mark. When it went public in 1997, it offered $18 a share.

Amazon began life in Seattle in 1994 and in that time, CEO Jeff Bezos has become the world's richest man. Initially, It sold books and CDs online but has since grown into a technology giant with e-commerce, entertainment and cloud computing departments, the last of which being AWS, where it makes large revenues.

The company now hosts big name websites such as Netflix and Airbnb and is currently leading the race to a 10 billion contract to provide cloud services to the US Department of Defense.

In July, AWS reportedly raked in $6.1 billion for the online retail giant in its 2018 second quarter financial results. Part of the reason for its high revenues is the ongoing trend of digital transformation running through companies. Its second-quarter results were due to big contracts with Ryanair, Major League Baseball, 21st Century Fox and Epic Games.

AWS is currently the leader in the public cloud, with Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and Google Cloud in second and third place respectively, but the company as a whole is second to another tech giant in the race to $1 trillion.

Only a month ago, it was reported that Apple had become the world's first trillion-dollar company after soaring share prices pushed the phone manufacturer past the landmark valuation.

The Cupertino company pulled in profits of $11.5 billion over three months after recording record sales that hit $53.3 billion. Apple's shares jumped, pushing the value of the company up from $935 billion towards $1 trillion.

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognize him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.