Amazon has spent much effort over the past several years denying it has ambitions to become a parcel carrier that would compete with UPS and FedEx, despite much evidence to the contrary (construction of a major new air hub in Northerm Kentucky, Amazon Delivery Service Partners program, soliciting parcel shipping business from its marketplace customers, etc.).

Maybe Amazon doesn't want to compete against the major parcel carriers in the general marketplace. But it certainly has aggressive plans with regard to its own parcel shipments.

As shown in the chart below, from an article on Axios.com, earlier this year Amazon became its own largest carriers in terms of parcel volumes, surpassing the US Postal Service, and has grown that to a dominant 47.6% now, headed in would seem ever higher.

Just two years ago, the Postal Service delivered more than 60% of Amazon parcels, and Amazon just around 15%.

"Amazon is about 40% of all ecommerce. If they're handling half of their own shipments, that's 20% of the whole market," Alex Pellas, a logistics expert at market research firm Rakuten Intelligence, told Aptios. "That's huge."

We will note though that ecommerce is still much smaller than the B2B parcel market - though growing much more quickly.

Amazon, however, disputes the Rakuten numbers.

In a statement to Axios, Amazon said, "The numbers are not an accurate representation of how Amazon shipments are shared between Amazon and our carrier partners."

But just how far off Amazon didn't say.

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