Alphabet Hits $1 Trillion Market Valuation

Alphabet has achieved a market capitalisation of $1 trillion, making it the fourth US company to reach that significant financial milestone.

At the time of writing of Friday morning, Google’s parent still enjoyed a market value of just over $1 trillion, after a 12.5 percent rise in its share price to $1,451.

The news comes after the markets reacted favourably when Alphabet announced in December that co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were stepping down from leadership roles at the firm, leaving Google CEO Sundar Pichai to take the role as CEO of Alphabet.

Trillion valuation

Alphabet is now the fourth US company to reach the $1 trillion valuation milestone, behind Apple, Amazon and then Microsoft.

In August 2018 Apple became the first company in the world to reach a worth of $1 trillion (£770bn), thanks to ongoing strong financials at the iPad maker.

Amazon followed shortly after in hitting the $1 trillion mark in September 2018, driven mostly by the e-commerce giant’s s broadening product portfolio.

In April 2019 Microsoft was the third firm to reach the $1 trillion mark, thanks in part to an unexpected surge in Windows revenues and continued growth of its Azure cloud business.

And now Alphabet has joined this exclusive club, thanks in part to ongoing market optimism about Google’s prospects in the cloud arena, where many expect it to begin posing a serious challenge to market leader Amazon AWS and second place Microsoft Azure.

Analysts are also said to be pleased at Google’s stabilising advertising business.

The club

It should be noted that (as of Friday) the most valuable company in the world remains Apple at $1.38 trillion, with Microsoft in second place with a value of $1.29 trillion.

Amazon has slipped down the rankings to $931 billion, and is now officially (for the time being at least) out of the trillion dollar club.

Facebook is being viewed as the next likely contender to join the trillion dollar club, but it has some way to go, as it is currently only valued at a mere $632 billion.

To put these valuations of well known tech brands into some form of context, lets examine the market value of established brands from other sectors.

Car maker Ford for example is only valued at a mere $36.6 billion, whereas Tesla is valued at $92.5 billion.

US supermarket giant Walmart is valued at $328 billion, and oil firm BP is valued at $131 billion, but Coca-Cola only has a market valuation of $2 billion.

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