Report: Amazon expands into sea freight deliveries, acting as a freight forwarder for 150+ ocean freight deliveries from China to US since October 2016
Amazon has begun shipping products from Chinese merchant partners to its U.S. warehouses via ocean freighters, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop opened a year earlier, when sources reported an overnight airfreight operation built around twenty Boeing 767 freighters, and when Amazon's China subsidiary won US approval to arrange ocean freight for other companies in January 2016. The Wall Street Journal now reports the license is in active use: 150+ ocean deliveries moving Chinese merchants' goods to Amazon's own US warehouses since October 2016.
The significance is directional rather than volumetric — Amazon is stitching modes together (ocean, then presumably trucking, alongside the air network) so inbound inventory flows through infrastructure it controls end to end. That is the same playbook the later coverage confirms: a truck-freight matching service, shipping for third parties like Etsy and Walmart, and eventually Supply Chain Services spanning raw materials to final delivery.
First-order effects
- Traditional freight forwarders handling China-to-US lanes for Chinese merchants selling via Amazon lose that volume to Amazon's in-house forwarding, which bundles the shipment with warehousing.
- Chinese merchant partners get a single integrated chain — ocean freight plus Amazon's fulfillment — reducing their reliance on independent forwarders and customs brokers.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent forwarders and carriers face a customer-turned-competitor whose real advantage is captive demand: every shipment feeds Amazon's warehouses regardless of margin on the freight leg itself.
- Once the ocean leg is internalized, the trucking match-making service reported two years later has a natural feed of container arrivals to broker, deepening Amazon's role as a logistics intermediary for other shippers.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward logistics markets consolidating around vertically integrated platforms that own demand and rent out capacity, with forwarders and asset-based carriers competing underneath them — the endpoint visible in the eventual Supply Chain Services offering.
- Regulatory exposure grows with each mode: the 2016 approval to arrange ocean freight was granted for a subsidiary acting on behalf of others, and each expansion tests how regulators treat a retailer that is simultaneously shipper, forwarder, and competitor to its customers.
The trend: Amazon is assembling mode-by-mode control of global freight — air in 2015, ocean forwarding by 2016, trucking after — converting its retail shipping volume into a third-party logistics business that competes with the intermediaries it once paid.