It has been known for some time, but this week made it official: Amazon sits atop the 2026 Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies, with 2025 sales of over $700 billion.
That ended Walmart’s 13-year reign in the number 1 spot, as Amazon grew 12% last year, an amazing number given its existing size. Amazon will eventually be subject to the Law of Large Numbers like everyone else, but in a different way.
As a note, Walmart is still number one in just retail sales, but that too is likely to end this year as the Amazon juggernaut rolls on.
Gilmore Says.... |
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Air freight companies and parcel carriers are likely to take the hardest hit, while truckers, railroads, ocean shippers and warehouse operators are also at risk,
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A salient question; when does the US Department of Justice start to get interested in terms of anti-trust concerns, as every dollar of Amazon retail sales comes out of some existing retailer’s hide.
But from my perspective, the even more interesting question is whether Amazon’s 3PL services will eat the world too.
As we reported in May, Amazon sent a shockwave across the logistics sector with the announcement of its new Supply Chain Services unit, which will market nearly its entire portfolio of logistics capabilities to all companies, including those that don’t even sell their goods on Amazon’s Marketplace channel.
ASCS appears to be a centralized place for companies from consumer-goods manufacturers to apparel retailers to hire Amazon for services such as fulfillment, ocean and air shipping, and truck transportation.
That caused the shares price of a number of parcel and LTL carriers and some warehousing 3PLs to fall sharply, as the threat to these firms from the Amazon news was recognized.
Shares of FedEx and UPS both fell by 10%. Shares of trucking companies and other freight movers also took a hit, with GXO Logistics down 13%. XPO Logistics and Old Dominion Freight Line were each down 6%.
Amazon said that it already provides these services to ”hundreds of thousands of sellers” on its platform. It is now making use of extra capacity in its network to offer it to the general market as well.
The announcement identified several companies using some of the services, those being Procter & Gamble, 3M, Lands’ End and American Eagle Outfitters.
Each is using Amazon in different ways. For example, 3M is using Amazon’s freight services to move inventory from its manufacturing sites to distribution centers, while American Eagle is using Amazon to deliver on-line orders directly to consumers.
 “Amazon is bringing the infrastructure, intelligence, and scale of its supply chain services—proven over decades—to businesses everywhere, much like Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing,” said Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services.
Well-known Morgan Stanley parcel sector analyst Ravi Shanker had this to say about the move in a research note, according to Bloomberg: “ASCS could be a watershed moment for North American freight transportation companies.”
Air freight companies and parcel carriers are likely to take the hardest hit, while truckers, railroads, ocean shippers and warehouse operators are also at risk, Shanker wrote.
The move to tie together all of its supply-chain services in one place in effect officially makes Amazon a third-party logistics provider, or 3PL. It positions Amazon to take a bigger bite out of a global market for third-party logistics services that is estimated at more than $1.3 trillion, according to research group Armstrong & Associates.
According to a report on the news by the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has sold fulfillment services to companies that list goods on its retail marketplace for 20 years. Third-party seller services accounted for about 24% of the company’s total revenue last year with $172 billion in net sales.
Those services propelled Amazon to become the world’s largest third-party logistics company based on gross logistics revenue in 2025, according to Armstrong & Associates. The company wasn’t even in the top 10 of that list a decade ago, said Evan Armstrong, chief executive of Armstrong & Associates.
But the services to date have largely been offered piecemeal, allowing companies to hire Amazon specifically for e-commerce order fulfillment, or for shipping freight, but not for their full supply chain needs.
What I just find intriguing id if Amazon has built an infrastructure and set of capabilities – driven by is never-ending revenue growth, that existing 3PLs, just as with existing retailers, will have a hard time competing with.
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