Amazon is now the third most valued company in the world

Amazon has overthrown Microsoft to become the third most valued company in the world.

The online retailing giant’s stock surged 2.6 percent on Wednesday, allowing the company to close trading of the day $1451.05 with a market cap of $702.5 billion- making it the No.3 most valuable company in the world toppling Microsoft from its position.

Microsoft has a market cap of $699.2 billion, after its shares rose by 1.6 percent, to $90.81 Wednesday.

Only Apple, worth $849.2 billion and Google parent Alphabet, worth $745.1 billion, are the two companies now ahead of Amazon. And with a market cap of $521.5 billion, Facebook stands at No. 5.

Amazon has nearly quadrupled in value over the last three years, with an increase that has turned its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, into the world’s richest person displacing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Both the companies are from different fields, with Amazon ruling the e-commerce and Microsoft owning the computer. But they are battling each other in cloud infrastructure, where Amazon’s early lead is creating a lot of excitement on Wall Street.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index put Bezos’ net worth at $118 billion on Wednesday and Gates’ wealth was marked $90.3 billion.

It took Amazon 21 years to close the gap between an upstart online bookseller and one of the world’s dominant high-tech firms. Amazon.com shares surged on their first day of public trading in May 1997, valuing the company at $560 million, according to S&P Capital IQ.

Amazon, which made deep cuts to survive the bursting internet bubble, spent the same period laying the groundwork for its domination of online retail, expanding into new categories of goods and building a logistics network designed to speed delivery to consumers.