TOBY SHAPSHAK: Amazon confirms its superstar status
A month after Apple passed $1-trillion, Amazon has also reached the magical 13-digit valuation figure
Just a month after Apple became the first company to pass the magical $1-trillion threshold, Amazon has done the same. It’s not called the "everything store" for nothing. From its origins as an online bookseller, it has morphed into an e-commerce giant and the largest provider of cloud computing. Its annual revenue is a staggering $178bn and it accounts for US49c of every dollar spent on e-commerce in the US, according to eMarketer. And it’s only going to get bigger. When Jeff Bezos started it in 1994, he reportedly chose the name Amazon so that it would appear at the top of the alphabetical lists that were popular at the time. Dubbed "Earth’s biggest bookstore", Amazon disrupted not only the book-selling business — putting innumerable bookstores and chains like Barnes & Noble under pressure — but became the everything store, selling products from toilet paper to televisions. Its loyalty programme, called Prime, initially offered free two-day delivery but began to add other services...
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