The US has a new delivery king

Amazon has surpassed FedEx and UPS to become the biggest delivery business in the US, according to a new report from the WSJ. And, much like Max Verstappen getting into a straightaway, the gap is already starting to widen.

By the numbers: Amazon’s internal projections indicate it’ll deliver ~5.9 billion packages by the end of the year, per the WSJ, up from 5.2 billion in 2022. In their last respective fiscal years, UPS delivered 5.3 billion packages and FedEx delivered 3.1 billion, and neither expects to exceed that volume this year.

How it happened: Rewind to 2016, when Amazon was viewed by logistics CEOs the same way the ugly duckling was before growing up. FedEx’s then-CEO Fred Smith called the notion of Amazon becoming a logistics threat “fantastical.”

Amazon was a distant third to FedEx and UPS at the time. But in 2018, the e-commerce giant launched a program where entrepreneurs could start their own franchise delivering Amazon packages. The program has grown to ~200,000 US drivers, and played a major role in helping the company accelerate the number of packages it was able to deliver each day, per former execs. Investments into its logistics network haven't hurt, either.

🖐️ But, but, but… there is a technicality to this story. The US Postal Service – which technically isn’t a business even though it pretty much operates like one – shipped 6.7 billion parcels in 2022, making it the still undisputed king of the US delivery game.