UPS and Amazon: Made for each other? - Freight Waves
Wisdom holds that the alliance will collapse as interests diverge. Right now, it’s getting stronger.
Like most mega-companies, UPS Inc. is loath to publicly discuss customers or its relationships with them. It refuses to answer reporters’ questions about customers. It never mentions them in press releases or other media announcements. But the long-held custom went out the window last week. In announcing its fourth-quarter and full-year results, UPS not only disclosed a customer’s name, but chose perhaps the most visible company on the planet.
UPS said parcels tendered by Amazon.com Inc. accounted for 11.6% of its 2019 revenue, which works out to about $8.6 billion from a base of $74 billion. In UPS’s 20-plus years as a public company, no single customer has ever made up such a large percentage of its annual revenue.
Wisdom holds that the alliance will collapse as interests diverge. Right now, it’s getting stronger.
Like most mega-companies, UPS Inc. is loath to publicly discuss customers or its relationships with them. It refuses to answer reporters’ questions about customers. It never mentions them in press releases or other media announcements. But the long-held custom went out the window last week. In announcing its fourth-quarter and full-year results, UPS not only disclosed a customer’s name, but chose perhaps the most visible company on the planet.
UPS said parcels tendered by Amazon.com Inc. accounted for 11.6% of its 2019 revenue, which works out to about $8.6 billion from a base of $74 billion. In UPS’s 20-plus years as a public company, no single customer has ever made up such a large percentage of its annual revenue.
