Amazon becomes the 2nd US company to join the $1 trillion club (AMZN)

bezos tablets

Amazon on Tuesday became the second US company to reach a $1 trillion valuation, after Apple hit the milestone last month.
Amazon's stock gained 2% to hit the magic number of $2,050.27 per share on Tuesday.
Follow Amazon's stock price in real time here.

It's official: Amazon is the second US company to achieve a valuation of more than $1 trillion.

Shares of the e-commerce giant gained about 2% in trading on Tuesday to hit an all-time high of $2,050.27. Multiplied by the number of shares outstanding (487,741,189), that puts the company's book value just over the same symbolic milestone that Apple hit less than one month ago.

One trillion is a difficult number to imagine, regardless of what's being counted, and even less so when it's the value of a 24-year-old company with a plethora of business units in addition to its core retail focus. For context, the entire US stock market — the sum of all publicly traded American companies, including Amazon — hit $30 trillion in January.

Even more telling is Amazon's size when compared with the entire national stock markets of other countries. Its book value is greater than that of every stock market in all but 13 countries — even greater than those of Taiwan, Spain, and Italy — according to figures from the CIA's World Factbook (though several estimates are from 2015 or earlier).

For fiscal 2017, Amazon and its 560,000 employees around the world reported total sales of $177.87 billion, netting it an adjusted profit of $6.15 per share, according to the company's annual report.

But of that massive revenue, retail is slowly beginning to take a back seat to other higher-margin services. For instance, Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides hosting and cloud computing for other businesses, brought in $20 billion in revenue in 2017.

Here's the breakdown of how Morgan Stanley — one of the stock's most bullish sell-side shops — sees Amazon's five main units in terms of value.

amazon 1 trillion

Note that Morgan Stanley's theoretical breakdown assumes a stock price of $2,500 — higher than Amazon's price on Tuesday — which would give it a slightly higher market value of $1.32 trillion.

Amazon's astronomical growth from a small Seattle bookseller into one of the world's biggest companies has made its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, easily the richest person in the world; as of Tuesday, the 54-year-old was worth more than $166 billion, according to Bloomberg's billionaires index.

Bezos' riches have largely come through his ownership of 16.3% of Amazon's outstanding stock. Bezos brought home an annual salary of $81,840 in 2017, according to regulatory filings.

"This year marks the 20th anniversary of our first shareholder letter, and our core values and approach remain unchanged," Bezos said in his 2017 letter to shareholders in March.

He added: "We continue to aspire to be Earth's most customer-centric company, and we recognize this to be no small or easy challenge. We know there is much we can do better, and we find tremendous energy in the many challenges and opportunities that lie ahead."