Prime Day: Who Will Win the Delivery Wars?
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The most important thing in tech today is …
Local delivery wars. On Prime Day 2021, here’s the setup: For the past decade, companies including Uber, Grab, Didi, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, FreshDirect, Amazon and more have been pressing on an essential problem:
How do we use the mobile Internet to get stuff to people so fast that it feels like magic?
So far, Amazon is winning in a lot of categories the U.S. and other developed markets. It has incentivized a national fleet of contractors to deliver more items faster. Prime Day is a great battlefield maneuver: Amazon dangles discounts that get people to subscribe to a loyalty program, that delivers more items to them faster, that rises in profitability as people buy more stuff. But the company had better not get comfortable.
Rivals in categories like ride hailing and food delivery see an opportunity in the last mile, too. And just as Shopify has emerged as a $180 billion market cap challenger by arming merchants with tech tools to scale their stores, Amazon’s delivery rivals are amping up partnerships to help merchants scale speedy delivery.
Prime Day 2021 is sure to be a big money maker for Amazon, once again. But the company had better watch its flank.
Coming up today on CNBC’s TechCheck, 11 a.m. ET / 8 a.m. PT …
Inside.com CEO Jason Calacanis
While you were sleeping …
Stock futures were higher on Monday as the market attempted to rebound from the Dow Jones Industrial average’s worst week since October. CNBC
Google is closing its dedicated start-up space in London known as Campus. The Silicon Valley tech giant announced on Monday that it has decided “not to reopen” Campus in East London after it was forced to close by the coronavirus pandemic. CNBC
Bitcoin sank Monday on reports that China has intensified its crackdown on cryptocurrency mining. The world’s largest digital currency fell 7% to a price of $32,801 Monday morning, dropping below $33,000 for the first time since June 8, according to data from Coin Metrics. It was last trading at $33,243 as of 5:50 a.m. ET. Smaller rivals like ether and XRP also tumbled, down 8% and 7% respectively. CNBC
In the broader world …
The U.S. economy is emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with considerable speed but markedly transformed, as businesses and consumers struggle to adapt to a new landscape with higher prices, fewer workers, new innovations and a range of inconveniences. Washington Post
Iran’s president-elect said Monday he would not meet with President Joe Biden nor negotiate over Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its support of regional militias, sticking to a hard-line position following his landslide victory in last week’s election. AP
Afghanistan’s former president said Sunday the United States came to his country to fight extremism and bring stability to his war-tortured nation and is leaving nearly 20 years later having failed at both. AP
On the horizon …
6/21: 1 p.m. ET Fortt Knox 1:1 with Neeva Cofounder Sridhar Ramaswamy
6/24: 11 a.m. ET Microsoft “next generation of Windows” event
