Amazon Shares Crack $1,000 for First Time
Shares in Amazon briefly cracked the $1,000 mark today, a new high for a company that can’t seem to stop growing.
Amazon’s stock is up roughly 40% in the past year, making it one of the hottest companies on the S&P 500 Index, which averaged around 15% over the same period.
The company continues to expand its retail and cloud empires globally, resulting in a nearly $500 billion market value—more than double that of Wal-Mart, despite the latter tripling Amazon’s sales.
One area of recent success is Prime: the company now has 80 million subscribers in the US alone, a rise of 38% year-over-year, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, and eMarketer believes ecommerce will grow at four times the rate from overall retail spending in 2017.
Amazon Web Services, a global network of data centers, is also growing rapidly. AWS sells storage space and cloud services to a long list of major brands, including Netflix, Airbnb, and the US government.
Indeed, Amazon’s success has pushed chief executive officer Jeff Bezos into the second-place slot for wealthiest person on earth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—ahead of legendary investor Warren Buffet and behind only Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
Curiously, Amazon is now even toying with brick and mortar options.
