Amazon becomes $1-trillion company

Amazon’s journey from an online bookseller started in a garage to a global e-commerce powerhouse valued at a trillion dollars has centred on obsession with the long road.

The company initially incorporated as “Cadabra” by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and backed with money borrowed from his parents joined Apple as the second US technology firm to be valued at $1 trillion yesterday. “It’s funny comparing Apple and Amazon because they are very different companies,” said independent technology analyst Rob Enderle.

“Apple is basically a one product company nowadays; Amazon is anything but.” While Apple makes most of its money from iPhones, the Amazon empire includes global e-commerce operations, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, streaming television, groceries and more.

Created in a garage in a suburb of Seattle, Washington, the company renamed “Amazon” sold its first book -- Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter -- to a computer engineer in mid-1995. By the end of that year, Amazon was selling books online throughout the US. Amazon went public in early 1997.

The company for more than a decade put growth over profit, investing heavily in warehouses, distribution networks, and data centers. “Every cent they made they put  back in the company,” Enderle said of Amazon. “They kept their eye on the prize, which was initially to take over most of commerce.”

Innovation Neil Saunders of the research firm GlobalData said Amazon’s success comes from the fact that it innovates unlike any other. “This heady pace of creativity is the key reason why it stays several steps ahead of the market and is able to generate so much growth,” Saunders said.