With its first delivery center, the American e-commerce giant Amazon is continuing to build its own delivery service in our country. That is bad news for Bpost, Amazon’s regular courier service in Belgium for years.
–
Amazon wants to open its first delivery center in Antwerp at the end of this year. The American web giant is doing this to meet increasing demand and expand the capacity of its delivery network, it said in a press release. The web giant will manage the site itself and in the meantime is further developing its own network of small and medium-sized (but independent) parcel deliverers, where The standard previously reported.
The delivery center at the Blue Gate business park (in the southwest of the city) receives the packages from the large Amazon sorting centers in France and Germany, among others. In Antwerp they are then sorted by address, to be delivered by subcontractors to customers in the city center and the wider area.
Amazon is currently especially popular in French-speaking Belgium, but is increasingly looking at the Dutch-speaking market, which is still dominated by Dutch online stores such as Bol.com and Coolblue. In 2020, Amazon.nl was already expanded into a fully-fledged webshop, to serve Flanders in addition to the Netherlands.
‘Economic cherry picking’
The fact that Amazon is increasingly taking the delivery of parcels into its own hands is leading to nervousness at Bpost, which has been the regular courier service of the American web store in our country for years. In the south of the country, Amazon is said to account for about one in five parcels, two independent postal sources said earlier. The standard† Bpost is in danger of losing part of that volume.
• Amazon is chasing Bpost with its own courier network
Bpost remains a key partner in Belgium, Amazon says. But the postal trade unions fear that the web giant mainly wants to ‘pick the low-hanging fruit’ by only delivering its parcels in densely populated areas, while Bpost itself risks being left behind with the larger and more difficult-to-handle parcels or the remote customers.
The danger of ‘economic cherry picking’ is real, says Roel Gevaers, transport economist at the University of Antwerp. Amazon is already doing this in Germany and France. If there are enough packages to beg, the company prefers to do the delivery itself. ‘Twenty to thirty years ago, companies wanted to outsource as much as possible. But today Amazon is doing the opposite, taking as many steps in the supply chain into its own hands as possible.”
With its own delivery service, Amazon can also put even more pressure on the existing parcel companies to lower their prices, Gevaers thinks. ‘And they are already extremely low and barely profitable.’
The fact that Amazon, like Bpost competitors PostNL or GLS, does not employ the couriers, but wants to outsource the delivery to subcontractors, also fuels suspicion among the unions. According to them, this way of working makes the sector vulnerable to exploitation. Postal Minister Petra De Sutter (Green) shares their concerns and is working on a reform of the sector, which would restrict subcontractors.
• De Sutter wants to restrict subcontractors to parcel companies
Fifty new jobs
The new site in Antwerp should be operational by the end of 2022 and create more than fifty direct jobs, both at management level and for sorting employees. In addition, more than 200 drivers working for local delivery companies will pick up packages from the delivery center and deliver them to Amazon customers, the company said in its press release.
“Since operating in Belgium, Amazon has built a relationship of trust with various delivery companies in the country and will continue to work closely with these partners in the future,” said Robert Viegers, Director of Amazon Logistics Europe.
Amazon says it is investing in innovative solutions for the delivery of parcels. For example, customers can see how many stops the driver still has to make before the delivery, and they can use ‘photo on delivery’to ensure that a package has been delivered.
–
