How Much Is Amazon Worth?

Amazon is one of the most — if not the most — well-known names in the e-commerce industry. With its fast and convenient delivery, reliable customer service and perk-filled Amazon Prime membership, it’s an e-commerce giant to be reckoned with despite its humble beginnings as an online bookstore.

Now with a huge competitive edge in its core services, constantly increasing market cap, positive investor sentiment and visionary leaders like CEO Andy Jassy and founder Jeff Bezos, it’s easy to understand why this company is one of the most valuable in the world.

How Much Is Amazon Worth Now?

Many companies have suffered since the COVID-19 pandemic began, yet Amazon has positioned itself as a lifeline for millions of consumers. As a result, it’s now valued at almost $1 trillion in market capitalization — a $1 trillion market cap being a milestone it reached for the first time in 2018.

Amazon recently split its stock 20 for 1, meaning that for every share an investor owned, they received 20 shares at a pro-rated price. As a result, Amazon no longer trades for thousands of dollars per share. With a 52-week low share price of $92.01 and a high of $188.11 as of Nov. 2, adjusted for the split, Amazon’s market capitalization has fluctuated over the last year. At its closing share price of $92.12 on Nov. 2, the company’s market capitalization sits at $939.78 billion.

What Is Market Capitalization?

Market capitalization is often used by investors to determine a company’s value. To calculate market cap, multiply the number of outstanding shares by the current stock market price. Although market capitalization can help determine a company’s value, it’s not always the most accurate. It does not take into account a company’s financials. Share pricing can fluctuate, affecting the figure.

Take a look at three areas that contribute the most to Amazon’s true valuation:

• Economic moat and competitive advantages

• Market cap, revenue and outlook

• Leadership and executive team

What Is Amazon’s Net Worth?

The GOBankingRates company net worth is a more conservative valuation than most, taking into account only full-year profits and revenue from the last three years and the company’s assets and debts.

By this measure, Amazon’s net worth as of the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2021, was $438.118 billion.

Amazon’s Revenue

Amazon is one of the few companies to have hit a trillion-dollar market cap. In 2020, after a great earnings report, the company made a return to the $1 trillion club, joining the ranks of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet — the parent company of Google — and, intermittently, Tesla. Amazon’s revenue in 2021 was $469.82 billion, up 21.7% from $386 billion in 2020 and increasing by orders of tens of billions yearly.

Amazon’s stock now sits a hair above its 52-week low of $92.01 per share, bringing the market cap to $939.78 billion as of Nov. 2, 2022 — having dipped below $1 trillion for the first time since April 2020 on Nov. 1, according to CNBC.

The company has a high price-to-earnings ratio of 85.05. This is a reliable indicator of its current worth and the investor sentiment around Amazon, even if it’s too high for its current revenue and sales. Despite Amazon’s success, stocks with overly high valuations in the stock market should still be bought with caution.

In perspective, much of the stock market has had a high P/E ratio in the past few years, so this shouldn’t be a worry as its future outlook — a large factor in both institutional and retail stock investment — is very promising.

Amazon’s Economic Moat and Competitive Advantages

An economic moat, a concept successful investor Warren Buffett and CEO Bill Gates use to invest, occurs when a company has a huge market advantage over its competitors. Buffett would typically invest in a company that has an economic moat, but Amazon has more than one.

A Look at Amazon’s Many Moats: Prime, Logistics and More

Although existing competitors can do bits and pieces of what Amazon does, Amazon’s core e-commerce business and logistics ability are economic moats. As such, there will be no competition that can match it in its entirety anytime soon.

Prime

The most obvious is Amazon’s Prime membership, which is all-encompassing in addressing customer needs. From free, fast shipping, to Prime Entertainment, to the Amazon Prime credit card, the Prime membership is a large contributor to the value. It feeds into itself, keeping customers hooked on both shopping with Amazon and paying the monthly or annual subscription for the 5% credit card rewards.

Logistics

To accomplish its shipping speeds, Amazon also maintains an economic moat in logistics. Its Fulfillment By Amazon business that connects to its Marketplace and Prime — its other moats — leverages its large-scale operation to solve inefficiency and cost. This moat leaves Amazon well positioned to ride out the pandemic-spurred supply chain issues currently challenging manufacturers and retailers.

Competitiveness

This is not to mention Amazon’s competitiveness in many other areas. Among the more successful of these are Prime Video — a streaming service that competes with Netflix and comes bundled with a Prime membership — and cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services, which competes with Microsoft Azure.

AWS is in the spotlight for its decisive market dominance. As of the second quarter of 2022, AWS had 34% of the cloud provider service market share, while Microsoft Azure had roughly 13% and Google Cloud had less than 10%, according to Synergy Research Group.

The Positive Business Effects of COVID-19

Amazon’s revenue and worth grew during the pandemic as Amazon stepped up to the plate amid the increased online buying. The company’s net sales grew 9% in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to the same quarter of 2020 and surged 22% for the year.

To keep retail sales strong, Amazon pushed Prime Day forward to Q2, giving consumers a head start on holiday shopping. And the push continued, resulting in Amazon’s most successful Black Friday to Cyber Monday sale ever, in terms of both its own retail sales and those of its third-party sellers.

Due to its great success in emerging as a reliable top player in the pandemic, along with many other companies that came out on top, Amazon’s stock climbed higher. However, the outsized consumer demand that drove Amazon’s remarkable growth has tempered in 2022 with consumers’ return to stores and economic factors like inflation, increasing interest rates and the threat of recession.

Amazon’s Founder: Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos walked away from his career as an investment banker to open Amazon, an online bookstore, out of his garage. He managed to expand beyond books by diversifying into other retail products including music CDs and electronics, such as Kindle. He also introduced the Amazon Web Services — AWS — division, which has become the largest cloud-computing service in the market.

Amazon’s CEO: Andy Jassy

Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon.com, took the helm in July 2021. He’s the founder of Amazon Web Services and served as its CEO for over five years before replacing Bezos as CEO of Amazon. As part of his initial compensation package, Jassy received 61,000 shares of Amazon stock, worth over $5.62 million at today’s price, vested over a 10-year period. That’s in addition to the 0.02% of Amazon stock he owned previously, CNBC reported.

Top 10 Shareholders

Amazon is primarily held by institutions. The top 10 firms are:

1. The Vanguard Group Inc., 6.75% of shares

2. Blackrock Inc., 5.76% of shares

3. State Street Corp., 3.20% of shares

4. T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., 3.06% of shares

5. FMR, LLC (Fidelity), 2.80% of shares

6. Geode Capital Management LLC, 1.49% of shares

7. Morgan Stanley, 1.18% of shares

8. JPMorgan Chase & Co., 1.05% of shares

9. Capital Research Global Investors, 0.98% of shares

10. Northern Trust Corp., 0.93% of shares

How Does the Future Look for Amazon?

Though Jeff Bezos has stepped down, someone just as competent and ambitious filled his shoes. Having been at Amazon for 25 years — from the very beginning, when it was a tiny startup with no office — Jassy is just as much a visionary as Bezos, who has stayed on as an advisor and board member.

Amazon noted in its second-quarter 2022 earnings report, released on July 28, that pandemic, exchange-rate fluctuations, changes in consumer demand and spending and labor and supply-chain constraints could have unpredictable effects on business. Amazon still managed to increase net sales 15% in the third quarter compared to the same quarter last year. AWS sales grew 27% year over year.

“There is obviously a lot happening in the macroeconomic environment, and we’ll balance our investments to be more streamlined without compromising our key long-term, strategic bets. What won’t change is our maniacal focus on the customer experience, and we feel confident that we’re ready to deliver a great experience for customers this holiday shopping season,” Jassy said in a statement.

A press release accompanying Amazon’s earnings reported pointed out some highlights of the last quarter:

• Prime Video had its biggest debut ever with the release of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

• Prime Video released the inaugural season as the exclusive home of NFL “Thursday Night Football” with over 15 million viewers for the first game.

• Amazon.com had its first-ever Prime Early Access Sale, resulting in orders for over 100 million items from Amazon selling partners.

• Amazon added Venmo as a payment option for Amazon.com orders.

• Amazon introduced new Fire TV, Echo and Kindle devices

• Amazon announced it would hire 150,000 people for seasonal, full-time and part-time roles across its U.S. operations network to help with holiday deliveries.

• Amazon announced and expanded employee initiatives, such as pay increases, to fulfillment network employees and Anytime Pay for part-time employees.

Despite the strength in sales, Amazon experienced a $3 billion loss for the quarter and predicted weak holiday sales, sending its stock plummeting. As CNBC reported, Amazon, like other Big Tech companies, has struggled in a challenging economic environment and is also feeling the effects of having to scale back following pandemic-era expansion.

Despite its current struggles, Amazon likely has a bright future as it continues to dominate online retail and cloud services, maintains a strong showing in online media, home automation and other products and services — and just as importantly, continues to make Amazon a better place to work.

Is Amazon Worth the Money?

Despite some bumps due primarily to the post-pandemic economy, Amazon could be a solid long-term investment. Among 47 analysts weighing in on Nasdaq, the consensus rating is “strong buy.” The average price target for the next year is $142.29 in a range of $114.00 to $192. At a current share price of $92.12, the stock has very solid potential.

Daria Uhlig, Brenda Zhang and Joel Anderson contributed to the reporting for this article.

Data is accurate as of Nov. 2, 2022, and subject to change. 

Methodology: The GOBankingRates Evaluation assesses a company’s net worth based on the company’s total assets, total liabilities, and revenue and net income from the last three years. Base value is established by subtracting total liabilities from total assets from the company’s last full fiscal year. Income value is established by taking the average of the revenue from the last three full fiscal years, plus 10 times the average of the net profits from the last three full fiscal years, and then calculating the average of those two figures. The final GOBankingRates Evaluation number is the sum of the base value and the income value.

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: How Much Is Amazon Worth?