UPS breaks with Amazon to take ‘control of own destiny’

NEW YORK – United Parcel Service (UPS) suffered its biggest one-day share drop after shocking the market by slashing business with the world’s largest online retailer. 

The move to scale back business with Amazon.com by 50 per cent will allow the courier to focus on more profitable shipments. Ms Carol Tome, the company’s chief executive, defended the shift as necessary for future growth. 

“We are taking control of our destiny,” she said in an interview with Bloomberg. “They are our largest customer, but they are not our most profitable customer.” 

The company’s hand was forced by a subtle change in the economics of package delivery. While big couriers such as UPS specialise in express shipments, they have relied on the US Postal Service (USPS) for last-mile delivery of budget-priced parcels – especially to far-flung rural locations. That model began to crack when USPS hiked fees on UPS as of Jan 1.

That change is sending shock waves through the industry. Citing the steeper costs, UPS allowed its contract with USPS to lapse as at the end of 2024. But the switch poses a challenge for the Atlanta-based firm, which now must put more packages on its own trucks with drivers earning union wages – unlike rivals without labour unions like FedEx and Amazon.

In 2024, a commercial carrier like UPS could pay the Postal Service US$2.79 (S$3.79) to do the final mile of delivery on a 12-ounce (340g) package like a golf shirt. But the revised rates meant the same package would now cost US$5.10 to send through USPS, an 83 per cent increase, said Mr Glenn Gooding, president of consulting firm iDrive Logistics.

Amazon, which also uses USPS for last-mile delivery of small parcels, is not affected by the rate increase, he said.

“When you inject big price increases in a marketplace, you open the door to innovation and new offerings,” Mr Gooding said, adding that Amazon is likely to benefit from UPS’ dilemma.

Ms Tome is seeking to trim exposure to commodity-grade parcels, including those delivered on behalf of Amazon, and focus on more profitable business such as healthcare shipments. But there is no guarantee that will make up for the lost volume. 

UPS is targeting a highly fragmented, very competitive and lower-growth segment making up just 25 per cent of the industry, according to Mr Ravi Shanker, a Morgan Stanley analyst with an underweight rating on the stock. “The market will see this as a show-me story,” he wrote in a Jan 30 research note.

Investors signalled unease with Ms Tome’s strategy and latest revenue forecast, which came in below analyst expectations and last year’s results. The stock plummeted 14 per cent to close at the lowest level since July 2020. 

The shares have lost more than half their value since early 2022 and are close to where they traded when Ms Tome took over as CEO in June 2020. After riding a spike in demand for home delivery early in her tenure, UPS has seen falling margins and higher costs.

Three months ago, UPS seemed to be turning a corner. The stock surged 10 per cent on Oct 24 after it posted the first year-over-year growth in adjusted earnings per share after six quarters of declines. But there was a troubling sign: Low-margin shipments were flooding its network by utilising the company’s budget-minded SurePost option. 

As long as UPS could dump off some of those packages to the Postal Service, its earnings were shielded. When it no longer could, the outlook grew much more opaque.

Ms Tome told anxious analysts on a conference call that UPS will soon provide a glimpse of its outlook for 2026. “We’ll figure out a time to do that this year. Maybe at the end of the first quarter,” she said.

In 2024, Amazon made up 11.8 per cent of UPS’ total revenue of US$91.1 billion. The revised agreement to halve shipping volumes, which will be in full effect by June 2026, comes as the two firms’ contract was up for renewal. It marks the latest wrinkle in a nearly 30-year and sometimes contentious corporate relationship. 

In recent years, Amazon has developed its own fleet of aircraft and delivery trucks. But as its business has grown, it has also needed to keep shipments flowing through other couriers like UPS. That reached a crescendo during the pandemic, when demand for home delivery sent parcel traffic to all-time highs.

But in recent years, demand for shipping has softened as consumers have returned to bricks-and-mortar stores and sought to spend more on services than goods. 

FedEx, which uses non-union crews, began to part ways with Amazon six years ago, viewing it as more of a competitor than a client.

Tensions between Amazon and UPS have been less evident, but were strained more than a decade ago. Amazon craved additional capacity to meet surging e-commerce demand, while UPS was reluctant to make big investments for capacity that was needed only in the busy holiday quarter.

The tipping point came in 2013 when capacity constraints and bad weather resulted in Amazon shoppers not getting gifts in time for Christmas.

Then Amazon started building out its own last-mile delivery system to reduce its reliance on long-time partners like UPS.

Amazon used its own network to deliver more than two-thirds of customer orders in the US in 2023, using non-union drivers at lower pay rates, according to the latest figures the company has released. The UPS break will likely drive that even higher. BLOOMBERG