Amazon is Now the World’s Second Largest Company, Surpasses Alphabet


Amazon became the second most valuable company as it overtook Google parent Alphabet for the first time amidst Tuesday’s trading.

The eCommerce giant’s shares surged by 2.7 percent, pulling up its stock market value to $768 billion. Over the past 12 months, the online retailer has added around $350 billion to its market capitalization, surging by 85 percent. This was attributed to Amazon’s aggressive expansion into other markets, such as cloud computing and brick-and-mortar stores.

More investors are betting on Amazon’s profitable and fast-growing cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, to fund the company’s new ventures like original content, physical stores, and building data centers and warehouses.

Amazon is still behind Apple, the largest publicly traded US company with market value of $889 billion. But analysts think the eCommerce giant can close the gap. “They could have Apple in their sights at some point,” Tim Ghriskey, chief investment strategist at Inverness Counsel in New York, said.

On the other hand, Alphabet’s stock tumbled by 0.4 percent, trimming its market cap to $762 billion. The Wall Street ranking shake-up was traced to Monday’s tech sell-off following the political backlash over reports that a consulting firm leaked the personal data of 50 million Facebook users. Similar to the social media company, Alphabet also relies on obtaining massive amounts of personal data to target online advertising.

Although Amazon also collects data from site users, some analysts believe that the online retailer will not be affected by concerns about the new regulation on online advertising, unlike Facebook and other tech companies.

Fred Weiss, a managing director at CIBC Atlantic Trust, pointed out to Financial Times, “It is clearly companies that have proprietary personal data that they are able to market to advertisers. Those are the ones that are vulnerable, not so much Amazon. It does very little on advertising and is not being impacted the same as Google and Facebook.”

[Featured image via Amazon blog]



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