Undoubtedly, there were more than a few of you out there who decided to not even bother with the Black Friday sales crush and, instead, do your shopping from home. Not a bad plan, and one that a lot of others stuck with. In fact, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) was up just under 1.5% in Monday morning’s trading session after revealing that it was now the new top dog in shipping in the United States, ahead of even Federal Express (NYSE:FDX) and United Parcel Service (NYSE:UPS).
Even before Thanksgiving, Amazon was on a winning streak. It had delivered over 4.8 billion packages, and by the end of the year, it expects to boost that number to 5.9 billion. That’s up significantly from last year when it delivered 5.2 billion packages in the entire year. Interestingly, that’s not even the whole story; Amazon only counts packages that it completely delivers end-to-end. The packages it hands off to UPS, FedEx, or even the US Postal Service aren’t factored in. UPS and FedEx, meanwhile, include hand-offs in their counts, and both are well below Amazon. UPS figures it won’t clear 5.3 billion packages this year—what it did last year—and FedEx had only hit 3.05 billion as of May 31.
Potentially Limiting Factors Abound
While clearly, all the shippers are handling huge numbers of packages in the objective sense, there are some clear issues, subjectively, to consider here. Amazon recently announced plans to hire another quarter million employees just to handle holiday demand, and that extra roughly 1.1 billion packages it expects to handle in the next five weeks. However, recent Black Friday protests in Europe likely didn’t help Amazon’s case here much. This comes at a time when UPS drivers won major concessions at the bargaining table and also when UPS cut its own projections for demand in holiday shipping this year.
Is Amazon Stock a Buy or Sell Right Now?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 41 Buys assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 58.31% rally in its share price over the past year, the average AMZN price target of $175.50 per share implies 18.03% upside potential.
