In its 2018 10K filing, Amazon for the first time listed “transportation and logistics services” as a competitive sector in the boilerplate “risk factors” section, along with the existing list of categories including “physical, ecommerce, and omnichannel retail, ecommerce services, digital content and electronic devices, web and infrastructure computing services.”
Amazon clearly needs to get a handle on the growth of its shipping spend, which hit $27.7 billion in 2018, up 31% from $21.1 billion in 2017 and up a whopping 72% from $16.2 billion in 2016. For 2018, fulfillment represented 14.6% of Amazon’s net sales. Analysts see the company’s many and growing logistics initiatives as a way to offset some of that cost.
