Amazon to lease 20 Boeing aircraft for cargo services

PanARMENIAN.Net - Amazon.com Inc said on Wednesday, March 9 it had signed a deal to lease 20 Boeing 767 widebody freighter aircraft to handle more of its own deliveries in the United States, Reuters reports.

The deal comes at a time when the world's biggest online retailer is offering ever-faster, and increasingly free, deliveries for millions of online orders.

Amazon, which relies on carriers like United Parcel Service Inc and FedEx Corp to deliver most of its packages, spent $11.5 billion on shipping last year.

In a bid to assume more control over its supply chain and reduce costs, Amazon has rolled out thousands of trailers and launched a program that uses contract drivers to deliver fast orders.

But analysts said the long-rumored plan to build its own air fleet posed little threat to the leading delivery companies.

"This is an incremental negative for FDX and UPS as it will likely remove some higher yielding express freight and parcel volume from each of the respective networks," RBC Capital Markets analyst John Barnes wrote in a client note, according to Reuters.

The leased planes will start to go into operation on April 1, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Cheeseman said in an email. Amazon has been testing deliveries by drones but has not said when they would be in service.