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Image: DAVID RYDER/GETTY IMAGES
It's pretty much Amazon's world, we're all just shopping in it.
Shares in the ecommerce company hit $1,000 on Tuesday morning, a first for the company that Jeff Bezos started back in 1994.
So is $1,000 just a nice, round number? Pretty much, yes. It doesn't mean all that much. To put the number in context, Amazon shares would be worth $12,000 if the company had not split its shares numerous times (companies do this to keep share prices reasonable).
The more interesting number is two: Amazon is now worth double what Walmart is.
Amazon sits at a cool $478 billion in market capitalization (how much its shares are worth times how many shares exist). Walmart sits at $236 billion.
That might come as some surprise, and it should. It took a while for Amazon to catch Walmart–but only a couple years to leave its rival in the dust.
After going public, it took Amazon 18 years to catch Walmart in market value but less than two additional years to be worth twice as much! pic.twitter.com/TnW4s0eF5B
— Kid Kapital 💰 (@kidkapital) May 29, 2017
Walmart remains a giant company that dominates the in-store retail experience. More recently, though, it has been working to catch up with Amazon in online sales. It has been on a buying spree, snapping up ecommerce companies Jet.com, Bonobos, and ModCloth.
Amazon, meanwhile, has been diversifying into a variety of businesses. In addition to accounting for 43 percent of online retail sales, Amazon is quickly growing its business-to-business operations such as Amazon Web Services, which is used by millions of businesses to power their technology needs. They're also looking to do the same to areas like logistics and customers relations.
There's also more to its consumer plan than ecommerce. Its Amazon Prime subscription service has emerged as a legitimate competitor in the video market, while also offering two-day shipping and a variety of other services.
It wasn't always looking so rosy. Amazon spent years losing money. Its CEO Bezos gave little indication that this would change. The company invested aggressively in a variety of areas—and those investments are paying off.
This might be just the beginning. As Amazon continues to expand, some in the tech industry think that there might not be any parts of business not safe from Amazon.
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