Amazon Is Worth More Than Wal-Mart, Costco And Target Combined

Ahead of its earnings report, Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN’s market cap surpassed $355.5 billion, making it one of the 10 largest publicly-traded companies in the world. This means the stock trades at roughly 3.1 times the company’s sales, well above its specialty retail peers' average of 2x.

On Thursday, Twitter user @CapCube pointed out an interesting detail regarding Amazon’s valuation. The tweet read: "Crazy Town: $AMZN market cap is greater than $WMT, $TGT & $COST combined, despite those Co's having 6x AMZN’s $107 billion sales in 2015."

Related Link: Amazon Reports Strong Bottom Line Beat, Operating Income Surges YoY

In fact, when the market caps for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. WMT, Costco Wholesale Corporation COST and Target Corporation TGT are added up, the combined companies are worth about $342.75 billion. However, their combined revenue of $718.05 billion stands well above $107.01 billion.

So, several questions arise.

Is Amazon being valued as a retailer or as a tech company? Is the hype justified by the 20.5 percent three-year average revenue growth rate? Is it a growth stock or a stability play?

Traders and investors might not care.

The company was up another 1.7 percent, or about $13 per share, at $765 in the after-hours session. Q2 EPS came in at $1.78 vs. $1.11 estimates on revenue of $30.4 billion vs. $29.54 billion.