As usual, Amazon reported massive sales in its second quarter earnings report: $23.2 billion.
Analysts were expecting $22.4 billion in sales. It also reported a $92 million profit, equal to $.19 per share, while analysts were expecting a loss of $.14 per share.
Investors loved the results, sending Amazon shares up over 18% in after-hours trading.
At $550 a share, the company is trading at an all-time high, valued at about $266 billion — $40 billion higher than before the results were released. That means in a brief frenzy of post-earnings trading, Amazon added more to its market capitalization than the entire value of eBay.
It also puts Amazon comfortably ahead of Alibaba, it's Chinese rival, which is valued at $210 billion. And it means Amazon is now worth more than Walmart, which has a market cap of $234 billion.
The numbers would have been even bigger had Amazon, like many companies that have a significant share of their business overseas, not been affected by a strong dollar.
Amazon said sales would have been $1.4 billion higher if foreign currencies hadn't weakened against the dollar. In any case, they still jumped 20% from the same period a year ago.
Last quarter, CEO Jeff Bezos described Amazon's massive cloud computing business, which provides the infrastructure for many big internet companies including Netflix, as "a $5 billion business and growing."
The company released more details on AWS in Thursday's results. Amazon said the unit had $1.8 billion in revenue, up from about $1 billion in the second quarter of last year. The unit made a $391 million operating profit, up from $77 million a year ago.