After Apple, Amazon breaches $1 trillion market cap for the first time

Amazon stock has grown 70 percent in 2018 alone with Founder Jeff Bezos becoming the richest man in modern history.

A month after Apple scaled the $1 trillion market cap summit, retail-to-technology behemoth Amazon has followed suit.

The Seattle-based company’s valuation surpassed $1 trillion on Tuesday with its stock rising 1.9 percent. However, it soon tapered off, and Amazon ended the day with a $995 billion valuation.

Analysts reckon Amazon’s diversified portfolio to be its biggest growth driver. In 2018 alone, the stock has grown almost 70 percent. Following blockbuster Prime Day Sales in July, Amazon went past the $900-billion mark.

Founder Jeff Bezos saw his personal wealth soar to $150 billion, making him the richest man in modern history. Bezos owns more than 17 percent of Amazon stock, currently valued at $2,039 apiece. Last October, it was valued at $1,000.

Amazon stock has grown 123,000 percent since 1997, when it listed on NASDAQ. In the 21 years since then, the company has transformed from an online book retailer to ‘the everything store’. Amazon’s cloud division has been the biggest contributor, growing 50 percent in the second quarter of 2018.

“Amazon did really well in online retail, but then the stock gapped up when they showed that they could become successful in cloud. It's almost like the ticker changed from AMZN to AWS," an analyst told CNBC.

While Amazon will likely flirt with the $1 trillion-figure in the coming days, Google parent Alphabet and software giant Microsoft too are nearing the magic valuation. Microsoft is presently valued at $753 billion, while Google is at $739 billion.

A recent Morgan Stanley forecast said Microsoft could reach $1 trillion in valuation by the end of 2018 led by a resurgence in its cloud computing division.

Apple, meanwhile, is the only public company in the world right now to be valued above $1 trillion. However, contrary to popular belief, it was not the first to reach there.

Back in 2007, PetroChina (China’s biggest oil and gas company) briefly hit the $1-trillion mark on the Shanghai Stock Exchange before global oil prices collapsed and its stock tanked. Since 2011, however, Apple has been the world’s most valuable publicly traded corporation after surpassing oil major Exxon Mobil.

How long before Amazon takes over for good?