Congratulations, Jeff. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) touched $701.40 Tuesday morning, surpassing its previous all-time high of $696.44, set on December 29. The stock is now up 3.8% year-to-date. Or, if you take a more long-term view, it's up 46,660% from its IPO price.
The company has come a long way from its founding in July 1995, when it billed itself – ambitiously, it may have seemed at the time – as "Earth's Biggest Bookstore." The company's online marketplace has since moved onto selling, well, everything. Along the way it's moved into video streaming and music downloads, not to mention drone delivery and cloud services.
Amazon, which pundits in the '90s compared to Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) and the now-defunct Borders Group Inc., now hosts veritable titans through its Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Clients include Netflix Inc. (NFLX) – which has been known to account for a third of internet traffic during peak hours – Uber Technologies Inc., Airbnb Inc., and the U.S. Department of Defense (unclassified material only).
The company is famously profit-averse. It translated $107 billion in sales into just $596 million in net income in 2015, and the year before it lost $241 million on $89 billion in revenue.
But shareholders haven't complained (too much). Since the company's IPO on May 15, 1997, the shares' overall performance is pushing 50,000%. Shares were initially priced in the $12 to $14 range, then boosted – twice – to $18. Investors bid up shares over $29 at the open, followed by a high around $30 and a close around $23.50.
Yahoo Finance puts the stock's closing price the following day at $20.75, or $1.73. A bit of cross-multiplying allows us to adjust the IPO price ($18) to $1.50. Set against Tuesday morning's high, that's a return of 46,660%.
For comparison, the S&P 500's returned 148.2% in that time, not including dividends – which Amazon, naturally, doesn't pay. Not bad for a bookstore.
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