The Weekly Shipment: ‘Transportation is not a commodity like AWS‘ & other takes from our expert call on AMZN

Research evidence excerpt

The Weekly Shipment: ‘Transportation is not a commodity like AWS‘ & other takes from our expert call on AMZN

Deutsche Bank

Research

North America Industry Date

Transportation The Weekly Shipment 26 June 2026

“Transportation is not a commodity like AWS”

Richa Harnain, CFA & other takes from our expert call on AMZN

Research Analyst

+1-212-250-6285

We hosted an expert call this week with Marc Wulfraat, whose edge comes from

a proprietary Amazon facilities database he began building in 2006—back when Megan Makini

the e-retailer had just 20 buildings, versus a 3,000+ facility footprint today. Research Associate

+1-212-2501458

The key takeaway: Amazon is getting more ambitious in transportation, but…

Wulfraat’s conclusions largely reinforced our view that the near-term threat to

incumbent carriers remains selective, not systemic. In particular:

1) Amazon’s transportation ambitions are about sweating its own network

harder—not becoming a full-scale common carrier across every mode.

Wulfraat discussed Amazon “cherry-picking” lanes and nodes where it can

improve utilization, rather than trying to become “the next huge FTL vendor that’s

going to go to every location in the country.”

2) Amazon has transportation assets, but it needs to build more if it intends to

compete head-on with asset-based operators.

To offer some examples of what we mean:

• It has over 80,000 dry van trailers…but what about tractors? Our sense

is AMZN directly owns a much smaller pool of heavy-duty power units.

This presents an issue with it taking on more asset-based full truckload

business.

• It has many Inbound Cross Dock Centers (IXD) and sortation

centers…but fewer than 30 terminals optimized and dedicated for LTL

service (vs. 355 at FDXF, 300 at XPO, and 261 at ODFL; see Figure 1).