Amazon established as 3rd largest UK courier

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Amazon have firmly established themselves as the third largest UK courier according to stats revealed in the Pitney Bowes 2018 Shipping Index.

Amazon Logistics, who deliver goods for Amazon Retail and products stored in Amazon FBA by 3rd party merchants, haven’t increased their market share from a year ago and still hold 7% of UK deliveries by volume. However, the total volume of parcels shipped in the UK grew 8% to 3.2 billion parcels so Amazon’s 7% is similarly larger, the marketplace now ship 228m parcels a year.

In comparison to Amazon Logistics, Royal Mail shipped 1.2 billion parcels and Hermes 314 million making them the 1st and 2nd largest UK courier respectively.

We’ve yet to see Amazon monetise Amazon Logistics but this is a step which will surely come in the near future. Amazon have a long history of building out services and then renting them to third parties to increase scale and reduce costs for their own operations. In the UK, if they could recruit enough drivers, Amazon Logistics opening up their network to non-Amazon parcels would see volumes skyrocket.

Globally, parcel volume globally grew 17% last year to 74.4 billion parcels, up from 63.6 billion in 2016. On average, there were 22 parcels shipped per person globally, and 2,300 parcels shipped every second. Here in the UK we beat the average with volumes up to 3.2 billion parcels in 2017, growing 8% YOY, which represented 48 parcels shipped per person, up from 45 a year ago. This averages out to almost a parcel a week for every UK citizen.

The UK with 48 parcels per person is closely followed by Germany with 41, the only country with higher parcel per person volumes is Japan with a massive 76 parcels per person per year. In the US, it’s 37 parcels per person, 34 in Australia and 29 in China.

China’s Parcel Volume Triples United States – China (40.1 billion), the United States (11.9 billion), and Japan (9.6 billion) represented the top three countries for parcel shipping volume in 2017. China’s parcel shipments represent 53% of the total shipments in the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index.

China once again reported the largest parcel volume growth at 28 percent year-over-year (YOY). If we exclude China from the Index, the global growth number drops from 17% to 6%.

The Index expects global shipping volume to surpass 100 billion parcels in 2020 in aggregate across the 13 countries reviewed: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States.

Pitney Bowes Shipping Index 2018

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