Amazon trailers at the entrance to an Amazon warehouse in Kolbaskowo, Poland, in 2018. Photo by Bloomberg

Amazon Expands Trucking Program to Europe

Photo: Amazon trailers at the entrance to an Amazon warehouse in Kolbaskowo, Poland, in 2018. Photo by Bloomberg

Bogged down by ballooning shipping costs at home and abroad, Amazon is looking to rapidly increase the number of small trucking companies that haul its goods around Europe.

The internet retailer is expanding a little-known program called Amazon Freight Partner to Germany, Spain, Poland, France and Italy, and aims to train hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs in those countries to launch their own trucking businesses exclusively transporting freight for Amazon, The Information has learned. Amazon planned to roll out the program in those countries by the end of 2021, according to an internal company document from earlier this year viewed by The Information.

Amazon has already publicly launched the program in Germany, the company’s second-largest market, but a rollout of the program in the other countries is still in the works, according to a current Amazon employee familiar with the program.

Access on the go
View stories on our mobile app and tune into our weekly podcast.
Join live video Q&A’s
Deep-dive into topics like startups and autonomous vehicles with our top reporters and other executives.
Enjoy a clutter-free experience
Read without any banner ads.
OpenAI's Greg Brockman (left) and Google's Demis Hassabis (right). Photos by Getty.
AI Agenda google ai
OpenAI Hustles to Beat Google to Launch ‘Multimodal’ LLM
As fall approaches, Google and OpenAI are locked in a good ol’ fashioned software race, aiming to launch the next generation of large-language models: multimodal.
Photo by Getty
Exclusive google ai
Google Nears Release of Gemini AI to Challenge OpenAI
Google has given a small group of companies access to an early version of its highly anticipated conversational artificial intelligence software, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.
From left, a Google TPU, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian. Photos via Getty, Google and YouTube.
Exclusive google semiconductors
To Reduce AI Costs, Google Wants to Ditch Broadcom as Its TPU Server Chip Supplier
Google executives have extensively discussed dropping Broadcom as a supplier of artificial intelligence chips as early as 2027, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort.
Org Charts enterprise Finance
The People in Power at Tech Private Equity Juggernaut Thoma Bravo
Orlando Bravo may be the face of Thoma Bravo, but he’s not the only one calling the shots. The hard-charging, helicopter-riding managing partner has become the most recognizable person at the software-focused private equity firm.
Gigafund co-founders Luke Nosek and Stephen Oskoui. Art by Clark Miller; Oskoui photo courtesy Gigafund.
The Big Read space entertainment
The Elon Musk Investors With Dreams of a New Social Order
In February 2021, a Mormon film producer named Jeffrey Harmon returned home to Provo, Utah, raving about an exclusive gathering he’d just attended in Austin, Tex.
Flexport founder Ryan Petersen. Photos via Getty and Flexport.
e-commerce
Can Ryan Petersen Fix Flexport?
Ryan Petersen was getting antsy. This March, Petersen had handed over the CEO job at Flexport—the logistics company he’d founded a decade earlier, which had ballooned to an $8 billion valuation in 2022—to veteran Amazon executive Dave Clark.