One day after Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms suffered the biggest single-day market cap drop for any U.S. company ever, Amazon set a new record at the other end of the scale. After underperforming the market in 2021 and at the start of the new year, the e-commerce giant saw its share price rebound sharply on Friday, ending the trading session with a 13.5 percent gain. That equates to a market cap boost of $191 billion – the biggest single-day gain ever recorded by a U.S. company.
So what had happened for Amazon to have such a prime day on the stock market? The company had reported better-than-expected results for the holiday quarter on Thursday, including a 98-percent jump in profit and another strong quarter for Amazon Web Services, the company’s profitable cloud arm. And while Amazon’s profit surge comes with the caveat that it was largely driven by an $11.3 billion pretax gain on the company’s holding of Rivian stock, there was still enough to like for investors to be bullish, not least the decision to raise the price of Prime membership in the U.S. to make up for rising wages and transportation costs.
Amazon’s $191 billion jump eclipsed the previous record, set by Apple just a week earlier on the day after the iPhone maker had reported its largest-ever quarterly profit. According to Bloomberg, the global record for the biggest one-day gain in market capitalization remains untouched: PetroChina saw it market cap swell by $597 billion on a single day in November 2007.
This chart shows the biggest single-day gains in market capitalization of U.S. public companies.
