FedEx CEO Fred Smith has finally acknowledged that the company counts Amazon as one of its main competitors.

Smith has traditionally dismissed Amazon as a threat to his business.

But Amazon has become a bigger presence in this space and has steadily been building out its own delivery services.

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FedEx has finally acknowledged that it views Amazon as a competitor.

In a call with investors Wednesday, CEO Fred Smith called out CEO Jeff Bezos' growing logistics empire as being one of his company's key competitors.

"We basically compete in an ecosphere that's got five entities in it," Smith said, adding: "There is UPS. There is DHL. There is a US Postal Service. And now increasingly there is Amazon. That's who we wake up every day trying to think about how we compete against and give the best services to our sales force."

This is very different from what Smith has traditionally told investors. Less than a year ago, he dismissed the threat of Amazon to FedEx's business in another earnings call. "The prospects that this company is going to be 'disrupted' ... is fantastical," he said. "I'll leave it at that."

He went on to say FedEx didn't view Amazon "as a peer competitor of ours for many reasons."

Read more: Amazon posing a threat to FedEx is a 'fantastical' idea, CEO said — but the reality is much more complicated

But Amazon is widely considered to be a sleeping giant in the logistics industry and has steadily been building out its own delivery services. It has hundreds of final-mile delivery couriers in place and plans to have 70 cargo planes by 2021.

And as Amazon begins to execute more of its own deliveries (FedEx ended its shipping relationship with Amazon this summer), America's biggest delivery players could suffer.