Amazon launches its own plane line. Sort of

Meanwhile Apple seeks to plug its declining phone profits with new markets

Not content with its current world domination plans, Amazon is now seeking to control the skies and has unveiled its own airline. Well, kind of.

According to a report by recode, Amazon is shipping enough packages across the US that it is starting to need its own planes.

Amazon yesterday unveiled its first “Prime Air” branded plane, a Boeing 767 owned by Atlas Air that has been converted into a freighter.

Amazon’s senior vice president of operations Dave Clark said: “We have the ability, with our own planes, to create connections between one point and another point that are exactly tailored to our needs, and exactly tailored to the timing of when we want to put packages on those routes — versus other people's networks, which are optimized to run their entire network.

"We add capacity, we add flexibility and it gives us cost-control capability as well.”

Amazon is already increasing its vertical integration at pace. For example, it is opening its eleventh centre in Blighty this year and claims it will create another 2,500 permanent jobs this year. Much to the horror of supermarkets, it also launched its fresh grocery service in the UK.

It has also begun to pull in serious revenues from its cloudy Amazon Web Services (AWS) biz with $10bn (£7.6bn) in sales this year.

Elsewhere, other tech giants are seeking to diversify into new markets. The most notable example being Apple.

That is not surprising given the smartphone maker recently recorded a fall in profits 27 per cent to $7.8bn (£5.9bn) for its third quarter - mainly due to the slowdown in the smartphone market.

Some of those areas include Apple Pay, its long-rumoured Apple cars "Project Titan" and more recently a move to sell excess electricity generated by solar panels on the roof of its new HQ in Cupertino. ®