Amazon is quietly taking another step toward becoming its own delivery company – at least in the European market. The Seattle Times reported that the e-commerce company is planning to acquire Colis Privé, a French package-delivery company in which Amazon has had a 25 percent interest since 2014. The buyout of the remaining 75 percent of the company is expected to close in the first quarter of the year.
Colis Privé is not nearly the size of the likes of UPS, DHL and FedEx that currently deliver packages for Amazon, but this will be Amazon’s biggest step yet to enter into the logistics business. Once the purchase is approved, Colis Privé said it will continue to offer package delivery for all of its customers, not just Amazon. The acquisition suggests Amazon will eventually go head-to-head with FedEx, DHL and UPS in France, if not the rest of Europe.
In 2014, Amazon also acquired the right to purchase 4.2 percent of Yodel, a U.K.-based parcel-delivery company, and it has significantly added to its truck fleet in the United States, the Times reported. Colin Sebastian, an analyst for Robert W. Baird & Co. said he believes Amazon is developing a delivery service that meets more than its own shipping needs, because the global fulfillment market, which includes shipping and warehousing, is a US$400 to US$450 billion business.
Fortune magazine said that Amazon spent more than $8.7 billion on shipping in 2014, up from $6.6 billion in 2013. By creating its own in-house logistics network, it could lower those costs. Amazon made its cloud computing subsidiary, AWS, its own business, welcoming competitors such as Nordstrom and Netflix. Amazon successfully turned the expense of running its computing operations into a profitable operation, so the theory is that Amazon could do the same with logistics.