A trend line is expanding in the final weeks of 2023 seeing the online giant Amazon representing an increasingly larger share of the country’s delivery business.
What makes the trend line all the more remarkable is the fact that as recently as the fall of 2019, Amazon was in third place behind United Parcel Service and the FedEx Corporation.
According to new figures compiled by the Wall Street Journal, the number of parcels delivered by Amazon is nearing the 6 billion mark. The most recent figures available for UPS show it with just over 5.2 billion parcels, with Fed Ex distantly coming in at 3.3 billion parcels.
The trend line is not without some irony, notes the Journal: “A decade ago Amazon was a major customer for UPS and FedEx, and some executives from the incumbents and analysts mocked the notion that it could someday supplant them.”
Now, continues the publication, “Amazon’s outsize growth combined with strategy shifts at FedEx and UPS have changed the balance.”
The company’s initial delivery growth spurt was first observed during the Covid 19 pandemic months. At the end of 2019 Amazon was delivering around 2 billion parcels, roughly even with Fed Ex, but significantly behind UPS at nearly 5 billion.
By 2021, UPS was holding steady at 5.5 billion parcels, but Amazon was now in a solid second place with 4.5 billion parcels, significantly ahead of FedEx’s 3.4 billion.
Obviously, the large number of people confined to their homes during the Covid 19 lockdown, purchasing any number of products from the Amazon website, had much to do with its dramatic growth. But the Journal notes an additional factor: The company in recent years has built out “one of the largest logistics networks in the world.”
Amazon’s expanding delivery infrastructure in recent years has meant building any number of new sorting centers, warehouses, and other logistics facilities across the country.
Amazon’s famous same-day delivery was introduced in 2009, but confined to just seven cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C, Las Vegas, and Seattle. The introduction of the service Amazon Prime in 2015 saw same-day service greatly accelerated by the establishment of nearly 60 delivery hubs nationally.
In 2022, the company unveiled an autonomous mobile robot technology designed to speed up the process of packaging products.
Three months ago, the publication Forbes reported that same-day delivery by Amazon is currently available in some 90 metropolitan areas. But the publication also noted that an ongoing expansion of that service is likely to see a reliance on “smaller warehouses that are closer to customers than traditional Amazon fulfillment centers.”
By Garry Boulard
