Amazon is set to beat UPS and FedEx at their own game as the e-commerce giant is pitted to be the largest package delivery service in the U.S. by 2022.
The company’s CEO of its worldwide consumer business Dave Clark said in an interview that Amazon is poised to overtake its longstanding rivals in the shipping business. He said, “We expect we will be one of the largest carriers in the world by the end of this year, and I think we’ll probably be the largest package delivery carrier in the U.S. by the time we get to the end of the year, if not in early ’22.”
It means that customers will likely see even more Amazon delivery trucks on the road during next year’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Amazon Prime Day events.
Amazon has been steadily building up vast logistics and fulfillment operations since a 2013 holiday fiasco left its packages stranded in the hands of outside carriers. Its shipping operations are growing fast.
Bank of America analysts predicted Amazon delivered 58 percent of its packages in 2019, making it the fourth-largest delivery service nationwide, according to Digital Commerce 360. By last August, Amazon was estimated to be delivering 66 percent of its packages.
Amazon’s delivery prowess
According to a report, Amazon now has 400k delivery drivers, 40k semi-trucks, 30k vans and a fleet of over 70 planes worldwide to ensure its customers get their packages on time. Additionally, the e-commerce giant has built warehouses and air hubs across the U.S. to speed up the delivery time of its packages.
After the company faced difficulties due to the pandemic, global supply chain issues and labor shortages, it has begun shipping goods to new ports to avoid blockages like the ones it is currently seeing in L.A. and Long Beach, California.
Although other retailers have had a tough go of things during the pandemic, Clark said Amazon was well prepared to weather the storm. “These things don’t happen overnight. We’ve been building the logistics infrastructure, the technology platform that drives it, for two decades now, so we walked into the pandemic in a perfect place,” he added.
As Amazon is poised to become the largest delivery service in the U.S. next year, the company could eventually even begin allowing consumers to ship products to others using its existing infrastructure.
