Amazon’s Stock Just Broke the $1,000 Mark

Tue May 30 2017
Ramesh Sridharan (932 articles)
Amazon’s Stock Just Broke the $1,000 Mark

Amazon got a belated 20th birthday present Tuesday.

As the wider stock markets fell following memorial day weekend, shares of tech giant Amazon nudged upward roughly a quarter of a percentage point to the much awaited valuation of $ 1,000 per share.

The all-time high also pushed Amazon’s valuation to $ 477.3 billion in trading Tuesday.

Amazon’s reach to $ 1,000 also meant that the company beat out shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to the throne. Shares of Google and Amazon have been neck-in-neck in recent days, as investors continue buying into both companies — a sign that market watchers at least believe in both tech giants’ futures.

But, while Amazon briefly breached $ 1,000 early Tuesday, Alphabet shares have reached as high as $ 997 a piece.

That’s put Amazon in the same club as Priceline Group — the only other company on the S&P 500 to boast a quadruple digit stock price. Priceline shares were trading at about $ 1,857 as of Tuesday.

Still, share price alone is not a great marker for the value of a company. In that field, Alphabet’s $ 682 billion market cap is a head above that of Amazon’s, and Priceline’s $ 91 billion, putting Alphabet much closer than Amazon in the race to $ 1 trillion.

And aside from Priceline, Amazon also has another giant in the field of stock prices it can reach for.

Over the past year, shares of Amazon have risen 40%. It would have to keep up that same performance for another 615 years to reach the lofty valuation of Class A shares of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, now trading at $ 247,025 a piece. Granted, Berkshire Hathaway has never split its stock.

Ramesh Sridharan

Ramesh Sridharan

Ramesh Sridharan is our Stock Market Correspondent covering events and daily movements of stock markets in Asia. He is based in Mumbai