Amazon's got cloud computing – now it's eyeing logistics

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Business Insider has published a fascinating article looking at Amazon’s ambitions in the logistics space. There are a few signs to be interpreted, including its rapid network expansion, its shipping costs, which have growth fifteen-fold from 2009 to 2018, a move to in-house transport, away from the integrators, and the fact it declared itself a transport company in its most recent SEC filing. And, as one analyst noted: “Even Amazon, as big as they are and growing as fast as they are, will not be able to fill up [its expanding] network on day one. So similar to what they did with AWS, we think it’s very logical for them to improve the utilisation of their network and lower their own costs by opening up to third parties.”

It’s still small beer compared with FedEx and UPS, at least in aircraft fleet terms, but Amazon is a company that knows how to scale, has deep pockets and big ambitions. Well worth a read.