Amazon.com Inc has lifted restrictions established during the holiday shopping season that had prevented third-party merchants from shipping packages with FedEx Corp’s ground service.
Amazon had abruptly banned FedEx at the busiest time of year, saying its ground service was too slow — highlighting the e-commerce giant’s growing power over how products are shipped to shoppers.
Amazon told sellers the ban would be lifted effective 5pm New York time on Tuesday, an e-mail said.
FedEx shares jumped as much as 3.3 percent on the news.
“This is good news for our mutual customers who have come to rely on the FedEx Ground offering,” FedEx said in an e-mailed statement. “Our service levels have been very strong throughout a historic peak season.”
After Amazon banned merchants from using FedEx less than two weeks before Christmas, merchants had to find alternative ways to make deliveries, including through United Parcel Service Inc’s ground service.
Amazon declined to comment.
The Seattle-based company’s ban on third-party shippers using FedEx followed a dispute between the two companies, after FedEx failed to renew a delivery contract.
Amazon examines its delivery providers’ performance each year to determine order cutoff times for the holidays.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained