Amazon Overtakes Microsoft In Market Capitalization

And we can thank AWS for that! Buoyed by the unprecedented success of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, Amazon has just overtaken Microsoft in terms of market capitalization.

In other words, it is officially the third most valuable company in the US.

The retail giant surprised the market capitulation of the software titan for the first time on Wednesday, climbing to the dizzying heights of $702.5 billion. No surprises here either, as both Amazon and Microsoft are leaders in their respective industries.

Retail and productivity software.

However, both companies also directly compete against one another in the raging cloud market, with business booming for both the companies in recent years.

Amazon, for example, now attributes 10% of its total revenue growth on the AWS platform, with the cloud arm of the company pulling in $17.4 billion in sales in 2017 — up a remarkably impressive 43% from the $12.2 billion it had in sales in 2016.

At the same time, Microsoft reported that its Azure revenue grew 98% year over year, coming in at a solid $7.8 billion last quarter.

Getting back to the market capitalization bit, Amazon shares were trading at $1459.70 late Thursday, while Microsoft was worth around $699.2 billion after the market closed on Wednesday.

Despite this surge, Amazon is still behind Apple, worth $849.2 billion, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which stood at $744.8 billion.

Not a bad position to be in, all said and done!