In a quiet move, Amazon has been upgrading its ocean shipping service, sending close to 4.7 million cartons of consumer goods from China to the United States in the last year, records show.
This marks a significant move into what many believe is the company’s overall strategy of eventually controlling much of its transportation network from trucks to airplanes and now to ships, reports said.
In the beginning of 2018, Amazon’s freight shipping arm shipped over 5,300 shipping containers from China to the US. It marked Amazon’s push into the fragmented and complicated ocean freight market, allowing it to offer companies manufacturing in China a soup-to-nuts service that eliminated almost all other middlemen on the way to the US consumer.
This makes Amazon the only e-commerce company that is able to do the whole transaction from end-to-end. The company now has a closed ecosystem.
