Amazon.com. Inc. broke ground on construction of a $1.5 billion air hub outside Cincinnati on Tuesday as part of a plan to deliver packages to consumers faster.
“Let’s move some earth,” Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said as he climbed into a John Deere front loader and scooped a pile of dirt. “If you’re wondering, that’s fun,” Bezos said.
The new hub near Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport was announced in 2017, and is scheduled to open in 2021. Amazon expects about 50 of its planes will operate from the facility, which will employ around 2,000 people.
“This hub is going to let us get packages to customers faster. We’re going to move Prime from two days (delivery) to one day,” Bezos said Tuesday, according to the Cincinnati Business Courier.
Amazon AMZN, +0.96% announced last month it was cutting its Prime free-delivery times in half, from two days to one, and the e-commerce giant said it expects to spend $800 million this quarter to make the change.
The northern Kentucky air hub is part of a long-term Amazon plan to expand its own transportation and delivery network, so in the future it will be able to rely less on third-party carriers such as United Parcel Service Inc. UPS, +0.41% , FedEx Corp. FDX, -0.26% and the U.S. Postal Service. Amazon expanded its cargo fleet to 50 planes — all Boeing Co. BA, +1.68% 767 models — in December.
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Amazon shares are up more than 21% year to date, compared to the S&P 500’s SPX, +0.80% 13% gain.
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