According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has become the largest express delivery company in the United States, and its package volume exceeds UPS and FedEx. Amazon’s latest internal data shows that the e-commerce giant has surpassed its rivals in annual U.S. delivery volume for the first time. The company has a total of 4.8 billion packages expected to be shipped before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Its records also show about 5.9 billion packages to be shipped by the end of 2023.
By comparison, UPS shipped about 3.4 billion packages in the United States in the first nine months of this year. According to WSJ, the total in 2023 is not expected to exceed last year’s 5.3 billion. FedEx’s package volume in the United States is even smaller, and both include packages handed over to the U.S. Postal Service for final delivery.
The Seattle-based e-commerce giant delivered more packages to U.S. households in 2022 than UPS. It already surpassed FedEx in 2020. According to internal Amazon data, the company will further expand its lead this year. The U.S. Postal Service remains the largest package service by volume, handling hundreds of millions of packages for the three companies.
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Amazon share increases
Amazon’s share of the express delivery market has been increasing. However, FedEx and UPS have stated in recent years that they are not competing for parcel volume. They said that their focus is on delivering more profitable parcels.
Ten years ago, Amazon was an important customer of UPS and FedEx. Amazon’s rise to become the largest express delivery company was once considered absurd by logistics industry CEOs. In 2016, former FedEx CEO Fred Smith dismissed the possibility of Amazon becoming a threat to the logistics giant, calling it a “ fantasy”. “For the foreseeable future, the primary shippers of e-commerce packages will be UPS, the U.S. Postal Service and FedEx,” Smith said at the time.
At the time Smith made his comments, Amazon lagged far behind UPS and FedEx in the express delivery market. But in the following years, the company bridged that gap by building one of the world’s largest logistics networks. In 2018, Amazon launched a program that allows entrepreneurs to get an Amazon package delivery franchise for as little as $10,000. Amazon’s program, which has about 200,000 drivers in the United States, has helped the company quickly increase the number of packages it can deliver each day.