Sometimes, the mighty fall. In the case of Amazon (AMZN), they simply grow even bigger and more formidable.
With a current market cap of $390 billion, the Seattle-based retail giant is now worth more than the top eight traditional brick-and-mortar retailers combined, as Credit Suisse analysts led by Eugene Klerk mentioned in a recent note.
For the record, that roster includes Best Buy (BBY), Macy’s (M), Target (TGT), JCPenney (JCP), Nordstrom (JWN), Walmart (WMT), Kohl’s (KSS) and Sears (SHLD).
That’s an impressive, even astonishing feat, no doubt, given Amazon was founded in chief executive Jeff Bezos’s garage in 1994. But it’s not exactly shocking, given the rapid transition over the last 20 years away from shopping in physical retail stores in lieu of online shopping, where retailers like Amazon can offer lower pricing on products and services because they don’t have to offset the costs of also paying for physical stores. It also helps that Amazon has invested heavily in building out new warehouses to reduce delivery time of items from weeks and days to hours, in some cases.
In the last 10 years, especially, it’s even less surprising given Amazon’s bold bets in areas like cloud computing with Amazon Web Services — disparate-seeming areas and verticals Bezos has neatly tied together to create an elaborate digital empire.
It’s no wonder the company’s stock price is up 36% in the past 12 months. If the company has a growth ceiling, it hasn’t come anywhere closet to hitting it — yet.
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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.
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