Amazon has joined Apple as the second trillion dollar valued company and is on course to overtake the technology giant as the world’s most valuable corporation.
Not only is Amazon worth more than a trillion dollars, but founder Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man with a fortune growing at an estimated $250 million a day.
The corporation’s stock price has doubled in a year to $2,050.
Apple is also set to lose the most valuable corporation crown if the Bezos rival stock continues to perform on trend.
While Apple has taken 38 years to float to the top, Amazon broke through the trillion dollar ceiling in 21 years.
Now, consumers have trouble trying to avoid Amazon online as the company’s retail tentacles have spread into shopping, TV and movies, voice assistants and cloud storage.
Changing the face of retail
Amazon is blamed worldwide for changing the way people shop and for a relentless assault on the profits of traditional bricks-and-mortar stores that cannot compete on price, customer service or the range of goods for sale.
Behind the scenes, the cloud computing service is the real profit driver for Bezos, accounting for more than half of the company’s turnover.
Bezos started the business in his garage as an online book retailer in 1994.
However, the corporation is regularly criticised for paying low wages and poor working conditions.
“Amazon is now a large corporation and I expect us to be scrutinised,” said Bezos. “I think it’s true that big government institutions should be scrutinised, big non-profit institutions should be scrutinised, big universities should be scrutinised. It just makes sense.”
Apple had similar humble beginnings, but less spectacular growth as a technology manufacturer until the advent of the iPhone and iPad in 2005.
Google birthday
Elsewhere, another garage start-up that has developed into a global technology giant is Google, which celebrates a 20thbirthday this month. The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998.
Now evolved into Alphabet, Google is the globe’s dominant search engine and powers the market-leading Chrome browser, YouTube video streaming and Gmail email software.
Alphabet reported revenue of $26.24 billion for the quarter ending June 30 to generate a profit of $3.2 billion.
“We’re still pushing the boundaries of available technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and we’re still dedicated first and foremost to the user, to building products for everyone,” said Google.
Google’s market cap is $837 billion.
