India, June 30 -- When Delhivery acquired Ecom Express in 2025, the Indian logistics industry read it as a consolidation play - a larger player absorbing a struggling rival to build scale. What few anticipated was the vacuum it would create.

Ecom Express had been servicing some of the most remote pin codes in the country, carrying last-mile deliveries for D2C brands and vertical marketplaces in markets that the larger organised players had never prioritised.

After the acquisition, operations in many of these non-demand centres were either scaled back or the combined Delhivery-Ecom Express entity's pricing moved sharply upward.

Into that gap stepped two companies nobody had considered third-party logistics providers: Amazon and Flipkart...