Below is a chart of the historical market caps for Alibaba (the Chinese version of Amazon) and Amazon.com (AMZN). As shown, Alibaba (BABA) actually had a higher market cap than Amazon.com for quite some time just after BABA IPOed back in late 2014. Once AMZN’s market cap crossed above BABA’s in mid-2015, however, AMZN opened up a wide lead for a two-year period.
BABA has been on an absolute tear lately, though, and its market cap has ballooned from $220 billion up to $447 billion since the start of the year. While AMZN’s market cap has risen more than $100 billion this year as well, BABA has pulled to within $14 billion of AMZN at this point. Another decent-sized down day for AMZN accompanied by a gain in BABA would see these market caps cross yet again.
