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Amazon has briefly become the second US-listed firm to have a market value of more than $1 trillion (£779bn).

Shares in the e-commerce giant rose nearly 2% to a high of $2,050.50 in morning trade before slipping back.

Apple reached the same milestone in early August.

Founded in 1994, Amazon is now the world's largest online retailer. Its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is the world's richest man, with a net worth of more than $160bn.

Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said: "To reach a market capitalisation of over $1tn is impressive. To do it in a little over 24 years is extraordinary.

"That Amazon has achieved this demonstrates its dramatic advancement in both the retail and technology sectors, as well as the influence it now wields over large parts of the consumer landscape."

Analysis: Kim Gittleson, New York business correspondent

Like a pesky younger sibling, Amazon might be second to the symbolic trillion-dollar milestone - but when it comes to its rivalry with Apple, it's been quicker to hit nearly every hundred-billion dollar valuation hurdle.

For instance, it took Amazon just 16 days, compared to Apple's 622 days, to go from a market value of $600bn to $700bn, according to the Wall Street Journal.

This acceleration makes sense in a way, because Amazon spent most of its time as a public company reporting losses or negligible profits. Founder Jeff Bezos consistently said he would rather reinvest sales revenue into the company to give it a better, more profitable future.

It's a strategy that seems to have paid off: Amazon reported $2.5bn in profit last quarter, making it one of Wall Street's most profitable companies.

And the future seems bright.

Even more so than Apple, Amazon is in the business of how we'll live in the future.

Although nearly half of every dollar spent online by an American goes to Amazon, e-commerce still makes up just 9% of total retail sales here. And Amazon has also become the market leader in cloud computing, with its Web Services business line consistently beating expectations.

All of this suggests that when it comes to Amazon's growing market value, the best word to describe it might in fact be the name Mr Bezos reportedly initially had planned for the company: relentless.

Amazon reported nearly $53bn in sales in the three months ended in June, with record quarterly profit of $2.5bn.

The firm is expected to account for roughly half of all online shopping sales in the US this year - and nearly 5% of the country's overall retail market, according to research firm eMarketer.

It employs more than 575,000 people, a force nearly the size of Luxembourg's population.

It provides logistics, storage, loans and a selling platform to hundreds of thousands of third-party merchants.

Its profitable cloud computing division, which hosts huge swathes of the corporate world on its data servers, is the industry's global leader.</s>Amazon has become the second U.S. public company to cross the $1 trillion valuation threshold this year, one month after Apple did so.

Amazon shares hit $2,050.49 shortly before noon on Tuesday, bringing the company’s value above $1 trillion. Apple became the first $1 trillion company last month. It is currently worth about $1.1 trillion.

For years, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was pilloried by Wall Street and the media for the e-commerce giant’s habit of spending too much and earning too little. But that strategy has paid off in spades, with the company quickly gaining on Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. Amazon had $178 billion in revenues last year.

Other big companies — including industrial giants that have been around for more than a century, such as Boeing (market cap $207 billion), 3M ($119 billion) and General Motors ($55 billion) — are worth far less than the high-flying tech companies because their prospects for earnings growth are nowhere near as strong. Market watchers have been expecting both Amazon and Apple to eventually have valuations topping $1 trillion.

Amazon shareholders have already had a extraordinarily good year. The company’s stock has surged more than 70 percent since January, outperforming Apple, which has gained more than 30 percent. During that same period, the broad market benchmark S&P 500 rose 8 percent.</s>(CNN Money) — America’s is about to become the second $1 trillion company.

Amazon’s total value neared $1 trillion on Tuesday, following Apple’s ascent into 13-digit territory at the beginning of August. Amazon and Apple now make up more than 8% of the entire value of the S&P 500, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P.

Shares of Amazon were just $10 away from the $2,050.27 they needed to reach the $1 trillion valuation.

A trillion dollars may be an arbitrary threshold, but it’s still a remarkable statement of how quickly the 24-year-old company has grown, and the boundless confidence investors have in its future.

Just contrast Amazon with the brick and mortar sector, where 90% of American retail spending still takes place. In order to get to a $1 trillion market cap, you’d have to add up the valuations of the 14 largest big box retailers ranked by 2017 revenues, from Walmart to Autonation.

Investors are also way more excited about Amazon than other grocery, building supply, and general retail stocks, which have an average price-to-earnings ratio of between about 20 and 40 for the previous year, according to New York University finance professor and valuation expert Aswath Damodaran. Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio is about 180.

So how did we get here?

For years, investors buoyed Amazon’s stock without seeing the company generate significant profits, as it poured revenues back into the business: Building out its fulfillment center network, buying up companies, and developing new technologies.

But over the past year, Amazon has started turning up the dial on profits.

At the beginning of 2018, the company was worth just $580 billion. In the second quarter, the company’s net income ballooned to $2.5 billion, compared to $197 million in second quarter of 2017.

Driving those margins: The success of Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud business, as well as the advertising it sells across its sites and revenues from Prime membership subscriptions.

Watching Amazon flex its profit muscles has boosted analysts’ enthusiasm for the stock even further.

Morgan Stanley recently raised its price target to $2,500, which would make Amazon worth $1.2 trillion, based on revenue growth projections of 24% per year through 2020. It values Amazon Web Services, now an ubiquitous layer of the internet that supports enterprises ranging from the smallest startup to the Central Intelligence Agency, at $375 billion.

The company’s moves over the past year have even won over former skeptics who previously believed Amazon’s stock was overhyped.

Daniel Martins, who heads his own independent research firm, thought Amazon was too expensive in early 2017 because optimistic growth expectations seemed already baked in to the price. But after evaluating its most recent financial results, including aggressive expansion into new industries and other countries, he now predicts Amazon could double in value by 2020.

“It’s too high of a bar to assume that they’ll succeed at everything that they do,” Martins says. “But at the same time, I think Amazon is the best combination in the world of the scale of a large company and that entrepreneurial DNA with the spirit of a startup.”

Amazon is appealing to investors because it appears able to dominate any industry it enters through the power of the data it has on Prime members and its ability to get stuff from point A to point B extremely quickly. Groceries! Healthcare! Financial services! Media! Even your home cleaning service!

But if that vision became reality, wouldn’t it put Amazon on a collision course with antitrust regulators? Are investors pricing in the risk that a store that sells everything might get broken up?

Under current interpretations of federal laws, they probably have little to worry about.

Antitrust regulators typically look at whether a company has used its dominance in a given market to raise prices on consumers. So far, Amazon has only lowered prices — no competitive harm.

But scholars have raised concerns that over time, Amazon’s control of consumer pocketbooks could prevent the next trillion dollar company from ever gaining traction.

“if it means a long-term innovation loss, the tradeoffs might be ones that we don’t want to live with,” says Hal Singer, a senior fellow at George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center and a principal at Economists, Inc.

He has proposed creating a special tribunal for complaints that online platforms are unfairly discriminating against content providers or potential challengers, which Senator Mark Warner referenced in a policy framework for internet companies.

At the moment, though, no such protection exists.

“If antitrust stays the same, then there really is no risk,” Singer says. “I think Amazon shareholders should sleep very well at night.”

© Copyright 2018 CNN. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>For a short while Tuesday, Amazon joined Apple and hit a $1 trillion valuation.

The e-commerce giant's stock rose to a high of $2,050.50 on Tuesday morning. It needed to reach $2,050.27 to cross the trillion-dollar threshold, based on the count of 487,741,189 shares from Amazon's most recent quarterly report in July.

Amazon is the second US company to hit that mark, driven by its continued dominance in the retail world and its highly profitable cloud services business.

Amazon didn't stick around that level for long. The company recently traded at $2,024.64, up 0.6 percent from the previous trading session but below the $1 trillion mark, according to Yahoo Finance.

Apple became a trillion-dollar company in early August, hitting $207.05 a share. It was the first US company to make that mark, and the second public company reached a trillion in the world. PetroChina, an oil and gas company, hit $1 trillion for a short time on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2007. On Tuesday, Apple's market cap hovered around $1.1 trillion.</s>Amazon on 4 September became the second US public company after Apple to hit the $1 trillion valuation mark.

Last month, Apple became the first US company to become a $1 trillion company.

According to a report in CBS News, Amazon shares hit $2,050.49 — climbing 1.5 per cent in the morning trade — bringing the company's market value above $1 trillion.

Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos is already the richest person on Earth, with a net worth surpassing $150 billion.

He owns over 16 per cent of Amazon which he founded in a garage in Seattle in 1994.

Apple became the first $1 trillion company last month. The Cupertino-based iPhone-maker is currently worth about $1.1 trillion.

Google's parent company Alphabet Inc and Microsoft are fast approaching the $900 billion mark, reports said.

Facebook — which crossed $500 billion in 2017 — is not growing much owing to a massive data privacy scandal amid falling user base.</s>Amazon’s value has surged past one trillion dollars, making it only the second public company to hit the milestone in history.

The US internet retail giant’s shares rose by around 2pc on Tuesday, sending it past the $1 trillion (£780bn) mark for the first time.

It comes just a month after Apple became the first publicly-traded trillion-dollar company in history. Its value has increased further since, and it is currently worth around $100bn more than Amazon.

Amazon’s seismic increase in value in recent years has made its founder Jeff Bezos the world’s richest person. Mr Bezos’s net wealth currently stands at $166bn, according to Bloomberg, making him worth $68bn more than Microsoft co-founder...</s>Amazon becomes second US company to reach USD 1 trillion value</s>Amazon becomes second publicly traded US company to reach $1 trillion in market value.</s>Now that Amazon joined Apple in the trillion dollar market value club Tuesday, the race is on to see which company can cross $2 trillion.

At least one analyst is predicting that Amazon will eventually beat Apple to the mark.

D.A. Davidson’s Tom Forte said in an email Tuesday that Amazon may have the upper hand on Apple, because it has more room to grow.

The company has gotten to its current valuation partly because its cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, is booming.

Forte wrote that it has “been a godsend for the company’s profitability and, ultimately, its share price.” He added that if Amazon was “a money losing e-commerce company, we would not be here today.”

The strength of its web services business has allowed Amazon to continue to expand into other non-core areas. Last year it bought Whole Foods, and it recently bought online pharmacy Pillpack. Some rumors say Amazon may want to move even further into the media business and buy the Landmark movie theater chain.

And Forte thinks there are two other areas of retail that could also help lift the Jeff Bezos-led company to a $2 trillion market cap: gas stations and travel.

Going after Costco and Priceline?

Forte argued in a recent report that Amazon could emulate the model of Costco, which owns and operates gas stations at some of its giant warehouse stores.

He added that the company could offer discounts on fuel to lure drivers who are also Amazon Prime subscribers.

But it's not clear how Amazon would enter the gas station business. Many of its Amazon-branded stores are smaller, urban ones that don't lend themselves to having a gas station.

Another possibility could be opening gas stations at larger, suburban Whole Foods locations.

As for travel, Amazon actually already attempted to get into that business. But its Amazon Destinations site lasted only a few months in 2015 before being shut down.

Forte thinks that Amazon could try again, and offer services ranging from discounts on cruises and rental cars to airline tickets and hotel reservations. He said Amazon could consider a rival to home sharing site Airbnb, as well.

He's not the only one on Wall Street that thinks Amazon may make another run at the travel business. Morgan Stanley put out a report in March suggesting that Amazon may go after the likes of Priceline owner Booking Holdings and its rival Expedia.

Forte said Amazon's burgeoning gaming business, led by video site Twitch, could also give a big boost to Amazon.

In fact, Forte cited the opportunity from eSports as a reason why he raised his near-term price target for Wednesday to $2,450 a share. That's almost 25% higher than the current stock price and would value at Amazon at about $1.2 trillion.

But Amazon would have to more than double to get to $2 trillion, which isn't far-fetched

The stock did just that over the past 12 months, and it's soared nearly 600% in just the past five years.

If Amazon continues to post impressive earnings growth over the next few years, then $2 trillion may not seem out of the question.

That's why one money manager who focuses on growth stocks also prefers Amazon over Apple.

"Amazon continues to fire on all cylinders," said Matt Benkendorf, chief investment officer of Vontobel Quality Growth. "This is unequivocally a franchise that gets stronger as it gets bigger."

Benkendorf added that Amazon's big investments on Amazon Web Services and its retail operations are starting to yield sizable profits. As for why he owns Amazon but not Apple, Benkendorf said "there are questions about Apple's sustainability of growth."

Amazon's profits are expected to rise at a much more rapid clip than Apple's.

Analysts are forecasting average annual earnings growth of 46% for Amazon over the next five years, compared with estimates of just 13% growth annually for Apple.</s>Amazon is 2nd US company to reach $1 trillion market value
Amazon becomes the second trillion-dollar company in the United States.