Amazon has become the world’s second company to be valued at $1 trillion, reaching the milestone soon after Apple.
The tech giant’s share price rose on Monday to over $2,050, pushing the value of the to over $1 trillion.
Shares in Amazon rose by almost two percent to a high of $2,050.50 in Tuesday’s morning trading. The stock needed to hit a price of $2,050.27 to reach the milestone, based on the share count of 487,741,189 shares.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and has racked up revenues of $178 billion (£139 billion) in 2017.
The group went public in 1997 at $18 a share – on Tuesday those shares hit $2,050.
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) was first to reach the landmark valuation on 2 August when the group hit the $1 trillion market capitalisation just 42 years after it was founded by Steve Jobs.
Now both valued at over $1 trillion, both companies have a stock market value over a third the size of the UK economy and larger than the economies of Switzerland and Turkey.
Whilst the group is a trillion-dollar company, it has faced criticism over its attitude to tax and workers’ rights.
Amazon only paid £4.5 million in corporation tax in 2017 despite UK sales of nearly £2 billion.
The firm has also been accused of treating staff like robots at the employer’s UK warehouses.
Amazon said it was “simply not correct to suggest that we have unsafe working conditions based on this data or on unsubstantiated anecdotes. Requests for ambulance services at our fulfilment centres are predominantly associated with personal health events and are not work-related. Nevertheless, ambulance visits at our UK fulfilment centres last year was 0.00001 per worked hour, which is dramatically low.”
“We don’t recognise these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings,” a spokesperson added.
Shares in Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) are trading up 1.10 percent at 2.034,78 (1657GMT).