(Aug 3): Amazon.com Inc surpassed US$3 trillion (RM12.29 trillion) in market value for the first time, becoming only the fifth company to ever reach the milestone.

The e-commerce and cloud-computing company’s shares rose as much as 5.3% as of 9.35am on Monday (9.35pm Malaysia), adding to the raucous rally last week following second-quarter earnings that showed accelerating cloud-computing revenue. Amazon joins Nvidia Corp, Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc as the only companies that have reached that size.

Amazon had been mired in a selloff for much of the last three months as investors soured on shares of companies that had committed to spending billions of dollars on artificial intelligence. Its stock sank nearly 18% between its May 6 record and the three-month low it hit last month.

Those fears were eased last week after the firm reported that revenue for its Amazon Web Services unit last quarter jumped by the most since 2021. Shares surged more than 15% in response, their biggest one-day jump in more than 14 years, to add nearly US$400 billion in value.

That’s helped propel Amazon back into position as the best-performing Magnificent Seven stock this year. The gauge of its big tech peers has struggled this year, gaining only 2.1% compared to a 10% gain for the broader S&P 500 Index.

While the rally has lifted Amazon’s valuation from the 17-year low it hit in late March, it’s still far below where it has traded historically. At roughly 25 times forward earnings for the next 12 months, the stock is about 44% cheaper than its average over the last decade.

It took Amazon just over two years to reach a market capitalisation of US$3 trillion after first hitting US$2 trillion in June 2024. That’s faster than the more than six years between that milestone and when it first hit US$1 trillion in late 2018.

Wall Street remains overwhelmingly upbeat on Amazon’s long-term prospects too. The average analyst price target calls for the stock to rise about 14% over the year from where it currently trades, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Uploaded by Arion Yeow