David Shepherdson
WASHINGTON, April 6 (Reuters) – Amazon said on Monday it had reached a new agreement with the U.S. Postal Service for package delivery.
Sources told Reuters that the deal would result in Amazon, the USPS’s largest single customer, retaining about 80% of its existing USPS delivery services, or more than 1 billion packages annually.
Amazon’s plan to replace the Postal Service with its own nationwide delivery service poses an existential threat to the postal agency, which has a budget of about $80 billion. Amazon has annual revenue of $6 billion, according to two people familiar with the business arrangements.
“We are excited to enter into a new agreement with USPS that will further deepen our long-standing partnership and allow us to continue supporting our customers and communities together,” Amazon said in a statement.
Amazon earlier criticized the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to auction off its last-mile delivery network. The retailer had threatened to cut the cash-strapped Postal Service’s delivery operations by at least two-thirds, Reuters reported last month.
The U.S. Postal Service had no immediate comment.
(Reporting by David Shepherdson and Jacob Bogoch; Editing by Chris Sanders)
