The market likes what it sees. Earnings from e-commerce behemoth Amazon.com pleased investors, sending shares soaring by more than 12% in after-hours trading. The short version? Amazon’s cloud-computing business is going strong, raking in $2.57 billion in revenue in the first quarter.
The bulk of the stock surge happened within the first 15 minutes after Amazon’s earnings were released. With the shares trading at nearly $676 at around 4:15 p.m. eastern, that would give the company a market capitalization of roughly $319 billion, about $35 billion higher than the company’s closing market cap. That’s approximately the size of giant US grocery store chain Kroger. It’s also the market cap assigned to Yahoo! Inc. (though that’s almost entirely related to its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan). At any rate, Jeff Bezos’ everything store now ranks among the top 10 largest publicly traded companies in the US, rubbing elbows with traditional blue chips such as Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, and AT&T—companies that dominated their economic era’s the way Bezos is increasingly dominating his.