BoldIQ quoted in US News and World Report story about Amazon

What Industry Will Amazon Enter Next?

As ambitious as ever, AMZN isn’t afraid of entering new markets. It’s not just a retailer anymore. By John Divine | US News and World Report Staff Writer

Amazon.com, Inc. does pretty much everything retail.

What started as an online bookseller quickly expanded into other product verticals like electronics, clothing and toys, and eventually morphed into an all-encompassing web store with virtually every legal product you can imagine. AMZN even helped put a few billion-dollar businesses – RadioShack, Borders and Circuit City being three of the most prominent – out of business along the way.

There’s arguably no other American company ever that’s been so successful in so many areas.

That’s not to say there haven’t been flops. Amazon Local, the Fire Phone and Amazon Destinations each failed; the Fire Phone arguably registered as one of the biggest tech flops of the last decade. Still, Amazon’s track record of success far exceeds its failures, and with a hard-charging billionaire intent on taking humans to Mars at its helm, Amazon investors and competitors alike should be prepping for its next ambitious business expansion.

With so many irons in the fire, here’s a look at the ones with the potential to become the hottest over the coming years and decades:

Shipping. Watch out United Parcel Service, FedEx Corp., and DHL – Amazon is coming for you!

In recent years Amazon has been building up a fleet of aircrafts and branded trucks, has entered the ocean freight industry, and has lead the way lobbying regulators on drone delivery. Former Boeing exec and current CEO of the fleet/aviation software company BoldIQ, Roei Ganzarski, says these steps are necessary if Amazon wants to control the “entire supply chain,” which it does.

Amazon’s lightning-fast 2-day delivery for Prime members (it’s even testing same-day delivery for some products and locations) is a demanding timeframe for third-parties like UPS and FedEx to adhere to. So, like so many things, Amazon is in-housing logistics. The next step, Ganzarski says, is selling its shipping services to others once its capacity is large enough.

“Look at how they started Amazon Web Services,” the company’s cloud computing platform, Ganzarski says. “It was first based on internal need … when they figured out they don’t always need all of it, why not provide it to externals?”

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