Amazon has yet again quietly moved to ramp up its steps into the transportation realm, this time in France where it is expected to shortly acquire a 75 per cent stake in the French package-delivery company Colis Privé, that it doesn’t already own.

The Seattle Times reported that the e-commerce giant is planning to close out the acquisition of Colis Privé in the coming months and follows an earlier report by French newspaper Le Figaro which quoted an unidentified Amazon spokesperson who said the buyout would be completed in the first quarter of 2016.

The spokesperson noted that it would be impossible for Amazon to rely on Colis Privé to handle all its transportation needs in France, let alone the rest of Europe and as such the e-commerce giant would continue its commercial relationships with third party providers like DHL, La Poste, UPS and FedEx.

Amazon has not officially commented on the move, but analysts speculate that Amazon is methodically putting together pieces of a global delivery jigsaw puzzle that while may not ever fully take care of its transportation needs, will lesson its reliance on the global integrators and give it more control over a crucial component of its business both in terms of reliability and cost. Fortune magazine estimates that Amazon spent more than US$8.7 billion on shipping in 2014, up from $6.6 billion in 2013 and in the third quarter of 2015 alone, Amazon spent US$3.2  billion on fulfillment.

In the US Amazon is already trialing its own delivery service with aircraft operated on its behalf by Air Transport Services Group. The Times earlier reported that Amazon is negotiating to lease up to 20 B767 freighters. And more recently it emerged that Amazon is apparently running trials in Europe, between Poland, Germany and the UK using leased B737 freighters.