Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx who helmed the company through decades of growth, died on Saturday
The 80-year-old pioneer of modern delivery was the “heart and soul” of the business, according to CEO Raj Subramaniam in a message to staff over the weekend.
Smith, a Marine Corps veteran who laid out the idea for FedEx as a Yale student in a paper that scored him a C, was integral in forging the company into the industry titan we see today, with more than 500,000 employees on the payroll and ~$90 billion worth of revenue each year.
FedEx’s early years were notoriously shaky. Hampered by mounting debts and coming off the back of another loan rejection the mid-1970s, Smith reportedly took the company’s last $5,000 to a blackjack table in Las Vegas and turned it into $27,000 — enough to keep FedEx above water. But in the five decades since, the business has boomed, with more than $1.2 trillion in cumulative revenue since 2000 and a streak of positive annual profits going back to 1992.
The last two years have been tougher, however, partly because the e-commerce pandemic boom has faded, but also due to stiffer competition. Smith foresaw many hurdles in the early years of building FedEx into a logistics behemoth, but a giant tech company with almost infinitely deep pockets probably wasn’t one of them, and Amazon’s efforts in the delivery space have only intensified in the last decade.
Still, FedEx remains the world’s biggest express transportation company, making deliveries in over 220 countries around the globe. Not bad for a business that the founder dreamed up as a student ~60 years ago.
FedEx’s early years were notoriously shaky. Hampered by mounting debts and coming off the back of another loan rejection the mid-1970s, Smith reportedly took the company’s last $5,000 to a blackjack table in Las Vegas and turned it into $27,000 — enough to keep FedEx above water. But in the five decades since, the business has boomed, with more than $1.2 trillion in cumulative revenue since 2000 and a streak of positive annual profits going back to 1992.
The last two years have been tougher, however, partly because the e-commerce pandemic boom has faded, but also due to stiffer competition. Smith foresaw many hurdles in the early years of building FedEx into a logistics behemoth, but a giant tech company with almost infinitely deep pockets probably wasn’t one of them, and Amazon’s efforts in the delivery space have only intensified in the last decade.
Still, FedEx remains the world’s biggest express transportation company, making deliveries in over 220 countries around the globe. Not bad for a business that the founder dreamed up as a student ~60 years ago.
