Category: Industry News

In March, Amazon signed a deal to lease Boeing 767 widebody freighter aircraft to handle some of its own domestic deliveries.

“Deals to lease 20 freighter aircraft from Air Transport Services Inc. and 20 more from Atlas Air Worldwide will give Amazon a fleet with an aggregate payload capacity roughly one-fifth that of FedEx and about one-fourth that of UPS,” Moody’s analysts wrote. “This would enable the company to move more than 20%, and possibly as much as 30%, of its volumes with its own fleet.”

Does this spell doom for UPS and FedEx? Not likely.

While the shippers will take a hit on the top line, profits are unlikely to suffer too much as Amazon is actually a very low margin customer because of the enormous discounts it gets.

FedEx said Friday that the biggest acquisition in the company’s 43-year history has cleared its final regulatory hurdle, after the deal received approval from Chinese officials.

The Memphis-based parcel delivery service said the $4.8 billion acquisition of Europe’s third-largest delivery company entered the home stretch with approval by Ministry of Commerce People’s Republic of China. The acquisition is expected to close by June 30.

* Rare opportunity for EU court to rule on EU M&A principles

* UPS says EU antitrust regulators made manifest errors

Thwarted in its bid to acquire Dutch peer TNT three years ago, U.S. package delivery company UPS took its case to court on Wednesday, asking judges to overturn the EU veto because of “manifest errors” made by antitrust regulators.

FedEx Corp must face a second lawsuit claiming it shipped thousands of cartons of untaxed cigarettes in New York over roughly a decade, cheating the state and New York City out of tax revenue and undercutting their efforts to curb smoking.

In a decision made public on Friday, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos in Manhattan rejected FedEx’s bid to dismiss claims by New York State and New York City that it violated a federal anti-racketeering law and the Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act.