For Amazon.com (AMZN), it seems everything is coming up roses.
The company is taking an ever-larger slice of the retail pie and its Amazon Web Services cloud-hosting business would be a Fortune 500 company if it were a standalone firm, based on 2015 revenues of nearly $8 billion. Instead, AWS was a relatively small —albeit growing—contributor to Amazon’s $107 billion in 2015 sales, which landed the company its highest rank at No. 18 on the 2016 list, up from No. 29 last year.
Trading recently around $726, shares of the online shopping giant are up 72% in the past year vs. a mere 1.5% gain for the S&P 500. Amazon.com has dramatically outperformed the broader market going further back in time, including 291% vs. 66% in the past five years and a whopping 2607% to 65% in the past decade.
It’s not clear which is the cause and which is the effect but Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was the runaway winner in a survey Fortune conducted among Fortune 500 CEOs about which leader they admire most. “No other CEO got even a third as many mentions,” reports Fortune editor Alan Murray. (Notably, the CEOs couldn’t vote for themselves.)
Earlier this year, Fortune also put Bezos in the No. 1 spot on its World’s Greatest Leaders list. To find out why Bezos is so admired by his peers, you can read Adam Lashinsky’s insightful profile here as well as watch the video below:
But it’s not just other C-level executives and media types who admire Bezos and his firm: Amazon also ranked in the top five for “most influential” among Fortune 100 companies in a survey of over 10,000 U.S. adults conducted by SurveyMonkey. It also placed No. 1 in the “most trustworthy” and “company you’d most like to invest in” categories.
Amazon was the only company to rank in the top five in both the ‘influential’ and ‘trustworthy’ categories in the survey, which was conducted in May exclusively for Fortune. Overall, Amazon came in at No. 1 in the survey.
Amazon’s high rankings in the SurveyMonkey survey is particularly notable given the negative press that has surrounded the company over its working conditions, highlighted by a New York Times investigative piece last fall.
For more stories based on the SurveyMonkey survey, see:
- Here Are the Fortune 500 Companies Conservatives and Liberals Hate the Most
- Here Are the Top 10 Companies Loved by Conservatives
- Here Are the Top 10 Companies Loved by Liberals
- This Is the Company Americans Want to Work For Most
Fortune has published the Fortune 500 list of the largest companies in America for over 60 years. This year, for the first time, we commissioned SurveyMonkey to conduct a poll on the top 100 companies. Respondents were asked about corporate reputations, trust, influence, and global impact.
