Amazon

Amazon was founded in 1994 in Seattle as an online bookseller and is now one of the largest retailers and logistics operators in the world.

Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006, rents computing, storage and database capacity and is the single largest public cloud platform by revenue. A great deal of the internet - including many of the companies covered on this desk - runs on it.

Its other consumer lines include Prime Video, the Kindle, the Echo speakers and Alexa, and its Prime Air drone delivery programme.