The Big ‘What If’: Amazon Went Public in 1997

30 years ago, on July 5, 1994, Jeff Bezos founded his company Amazon. Initially conceived as an online marketplace for books, the company quickly developed into a mail order company for various consumer goods.

Just a few years after it was launched, Amazon ventured onto the stock market, with its shares traded publicly for the first time in May 1997. The company was one of many online businesses to go public during the first dot-com boom, generating $148 million in sales that year and posting a net loss of $30 million. It was valued at $438 million.

Fast forward to today and anyone who had the foresight to invest in the online retailer, now known as Amazon.com, and to hold onto their shares through the dot-com crash and the subprime mortgage crisis is likely now pretty rich. After several stock splits, an investment of $1,000 in Amazon’s IPO back in 1997 would now be worth around $2.5 million (as of July 1; at a share price of $197.2).

As this chart shows, the share price has risen year-on-year. The rise was particularly strong during the Covid pandemic, when Amazon's contactless model proved a convenient way for many to purchase consumer goods. Such pandemic-driven growth was not sustainable though, causing the share price to fall drastically and several thousand jobs to be cut. Amazon has since recovered from its share price slump and is currently at a record high.