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258 points polyrand | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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aabhay ◴[] No.34490445[source]
In enterprise, it’s often the case that your biggest customer effectively owns you. They get to dictate roadmaps, you’re forced to spin up a special team just for them, and it becomes harder to justify your investment into long tail customers because this big golden monkey is on your back.
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ketzo ◴[] No.34491293[source]
I worked briefly at FedEx corporate, and they made a big deal about their policy that a customer could never account for more than 30% of total volume.

Leadership often made it clear that Amazon was right at that limit, and wanted to send a lot more volume, but FedEx wouldn't let them, in order to maintain "independence."

To your point: it didn’t stop them from working to cater to Amazon’s every whim, and it did provide Amazon the incentive to build a (better and more cost-effective) fulfillment and shipping network themselves.

I don’t know what the “right” play was, and obviously the story is far from over. But FedEx always seemed to me like they chose the worst of both worlds.

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mritchie712 ◴[] No.34491541[source]
What % of FedEx revenue was from Amazon? Would have guessed it'd be much less than 30%.
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1. scottyah ◴[] No.34492426[source]
In 2018 (latest I could find with a quick search), it was 1.3%. FedEx said that no customer is more than 3% of their revenues.
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2. ketzo ◴[] No.34492899[source]
Wow, that's a lot lower than I would have thought. I wonder if my memory is wrong? The "30% of volume" stat stands out in my head, though.
3. BonoboIO ◴[] No.34498260[source]
Maybe they count each Amazon sub company as one customer.