Amazon just became the second most valuable publicly listed company based out of the US. This is the first time the company has overtaken Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Amazon’s market capitalization is at $768 billion whereas Alphabet’s dropped slightly to $760.9 billion due to the recent Facebook scandal where 50 million users’ personal data was obtained by a third-party political consulting firm.
However, this drop is not the only reason Amazon has overtaken Alphabet. They have been working really hard and have been expanding continuously into the cloud computing and hosting markets as well as partnerships with other businesses.
Forbes recently listed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world with a salary of $112 billion. But, he wealth has increased even further and has made him $40 million richer than Bill Gates, the second-wealthiest person in the world.
Amazon’s stock rose 81 percent within the last year due to the efforts of its Web Services and a greater number of businesses moving to its platform. “They’re using their cash flow to develop new businesses,” said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment strategist at Inverness Counsel in New York, in an interview with Reuters. “They could have Apple in their sights at some point.”
However, there is still some doing required before they can even think of getting close to Apple which sits comfortably at the top spot.Experts do say that if the value continues rising the way it is, then Amazon will reach the $1 trillion mark before Apple does.
Being the second most valuable company in the US is not driving Amazon to help its employees much. An investigation in September 2017 revealed that a great number of employees in the UK warehouse take home less than the minimum wage after paying a company bus benefit
This is not an isolated incident and there have been multiple similar reports from employees. One anonymous Amazon employee told The Street that “Amazon sees its employees just as bodies and does not truly value the work they do.”
“A lot of times we exceed goals but our productivity rate is not high enough to get a full bonus which doesn’t make sense,” the worker said. “We meet and exceed our goals constantly and as a reward, we get a ‘congratulations’ or ‘swag bucks,’ which is basically Monopoly money that we can use in the Swag Store [which sells Amazon merchandise].”
If Amazon wants to hot the $1 trillion mark, it will need the support of its employees and to get that, it will have to improve the working conditions and salaries. We will have to wait and see who wins the race between the giants.