Figures in the last Greenhill Book News, quoted from Publishers Weekly, showed Amazon with nearly 6% of American retail book sales, with Barnes & Noble and Borders having 45%. At the beginning of May the Financial Times (London) published the annual FT 500 survey of the top 500 companies by stock market capitalisation, globally and broken down by geographic area. On a world scale Amazon stand at position 219, with a valuation of just under $28 billion as at last 31st December (which had dropped by 25% to $21 billion by the beginning of May 2000), with a loss on the year of $720,000,000, but at that time with a higher stock market capitalisation than Dresdner Bank (which stood at position 226), Reed Elsevier at position 336, and Volkswagen, who made a profit of $3.3 billion, at 337. On the U.S. scale of companies stock market capitalisation Amazon stood at position 107 and above companies such as Xerox (368), Sears Roebuck (at position 432 and a profit of $1.883 billion) and Kellogg at 485. Completing the picture, if compared against British companies, Amazon would come in at position 17, and more highly valued than Halifax, Abbey National, Cable & Wireless, Unilever, Tesco, etc., etc. Amazon figures for the first quarter of this year again show an enormous jump in the first quarter in both sales (236%) and losses (a magnificent increase of 400%). Figures received from Pat Moran at Stackpole show Amazon's stock market capitalisation at the beginning of May - and after the significant drop in high tech stock values – still being 8.4 times the value of both Barnes & Noble and Borders added together. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 100 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com