Amazon takes Market Cap Crown, Cementing Tech Power

Amazon completed Monday's increase of 3.4% to $ 1,629.51, with a market value of $ 797 billion, the first time the dealer has reached market capital. It ended a week long government of

Microsoft
Corp.

, which ended up with 0.1[ads1]% worth $ 784 billion.

Software girl in late November replaced

apple
Inc.,

for years the leader before iPhone sales concerns – worsened by the company's revenue warning last week – knocking it to # 4, behind Google parent

Alphabet
Inc.

of $ 746 billion.

Monday's rise on Wall Street was driven by hopes for a new round of negotiations between Washington and Beijing. S & P 500 rose 0.7%, climbed for the sixth time in the last eight sessions. The Amazon shares have increased by 8.5% over the past week, stemming from a brutal stretch.

Amazon's 25% light last quarter – the biggest drop in decades – has pushed investors to look up stocks to start 2019, analysts say. Despite fears of slowing growth, e-commerce giant is expected to show sales in the fourth quarter up 20% from the year before when it reports revenue in the coming weeks, according to FactSet.

Technical stocks are well under the peaks, Apple was valued over $ 1.1 trillion in its peak in October, while Amazon affected $ 1 trillion before closing it in September. But they remain far more valuable than the most valuable companies in other parts of the US economy.

Warren Buffett s

Berkshire Hathaway
Inc.

is the closest challenger of $ 485 billion ahead

Facebook
Inc.,

whose value has plunged in the past year among a number of scandals.

JPMorgan Chase

& Co. and

Johnson and Johnson

two names synonymous with their industries, have market values ​​of less than $ 350 billion.

Walmart
Inc.,

A lush eater of consumer spending is less than $ 300 billion.

"They don't go anywhere," said Michael Lippert, who manages the Baron Capital Opportunity Fund, which counts Amazon and Microsoft among its largest companies. "These are big markets and neither Amazon nor Microsoft have dropped them. They still have many growth opportunities."

The persistent dominance of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google, even in a wobbly market, flows from its power to Disturbing old industries, forging new ones and generating billions in profit along the way. In particular, Amazon has expanded into a wider range of industries, from advertising to voice-enabled gadgets to streaming media, and recent quarters have begun to focus more on making money as well as growing.

The big four went from different starting points: Amazon in e-commerce, Apple in computers and smartphones, Alphabet in Internet search and Microsoft in business and consumer software. Increasingly, they break into each other's turf when they strive to be all things to all users.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are all major players in the rental of data storage and services to others, a business known as cloud infrastructure that Amazon essentially invented about 12 years ago.

Gardener
Inc.

estimates that the sector will grow to $ 65.9 billion globally in 2021 from $ 25.3 billion in 2017.

It was Microsoft's ability to lay its head down and focus on moving large corporate customers to the cloud and selling a cloud version of its popular Office productivity software that helped keep up with Wall Street with tech rivals selling flashy hardware and consumer services. It is now the number two company in the cloud infrastructure, but still far behind the pioneer, Amazon.

Google, a distant fourth, is not idiotic after replacing its slider chief recently. And while Apple is not a salesperson of the shooting services, it is estimated to have raised $ 3 billion in revenue from iCloud for fiscal 2018, according to UBS.

Google owns the search advertising business, where Microsoft also competes. But Amazon has built its own formidable business, leveraging its dominant online marketplace to sell consumer goods.

And they are pitted against each other in hardware, trotting out a variety of iPhones, Chromebooks, Surface computers and Kindle readers that double as vessels to push ever more software and services.

This strategy has especially helped Apple expand its services to a business of over $ 37 billion in fiscal 2018, as the unit's iPhone sales, the most popular device, slow down. Even Microsoft, who left the mobile phone market, has cut out a thriving hardware business with its Surface machines and Xbox video game console.

The tech giants also fight for control over futuristic and potentially lucrative arenas such as artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and intelligent digital assistants. Each company creates a voice-activated speaker, or in Microsoft's case, software used in other hardware. And they are hanging to put their bots in earshot of as many people as they can, shown by the Amazon agreement to allow customers to access Apple Music through their Echo speaker.

An autumn market route, driven by fears over higher interest rates, weakened growth and trade tensions with China, dried hundreds of billions of dollars from the market values ​​of tech highfliers. The group was left close enough to each other to play hot potato on the market.

Their struggle now for market reign becomes the egg of investors who are more than willing to return to the stock market's risky, faster-growing corners

. "Just as the broad fear of slowing global growth contributed to one of the most penal areas for technological stocks, the latest short-term optimism is factoring in their rally," analysts said.

"Momentum stocks took the biggest hits, so when there is a rise like this, we see them better than just because many people feel they have been sold," said Mohit Bajaj, director of ETF's trading solutions in WallachBeth Capital. [19659006] Write to Brian R. Fitzgerald at brian-r.fitzgerald@wsj.com and Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com