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FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam graduated from Syracuse and the University of Texas at Austin. But he also attended what he calls \u201cCEO school,\u201d taught by Fred Smith, FedEx\u2019s founder and first CEO. Subramaniam is its second; he took over the company in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Decades of experience informed Smith\u2019s CEO school curriculum. He first conceived of a system for urgent, overnight deliveries in an economics paper at Yale. Smith ran with the idea, launching Federal Express in 1971, and growing it into a global logistics giant with $90.1 billion in revenue in the past 12 months.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his first three years as CEO, Subramaniam operated with Smith as executive chairman, but Smith died in June at age 80, leaving Subramaniam without his mentor\u2014and FedEx without its founder\u2014for the first time.<\/p>\n
Part of Smith\u2019s legacy is FedEx, now a Fortune Global 500 company that moves about $2 trillion worth of commerce every year; handles 17 million packages a day; and operates 400 daily flights from hubs like Memphis, Guangzhou, Singapore, Paris, and Dubai. But it\u2019s also the big lesson he taught Subramaniam, which the CEO drew on last year when the Trump administration\u2019s global tariffs threatened FedEx\u2019s core business of moving goods around the globe. \u201cOne thing that Fred taught me\u2026is that change is part of our culture,\u201d Subramaniam recalls. \u201cHe always used to say: \u2018If you don\u2019t like change, you will hate extinction.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The biggest change of Subramaniam\u2019s CEO tenure was the day those tariffs hit, April 2, 2025, or \u201cLiberation Day\u201d as the White House deemed it. Trump imposed a minimum 10% tariff on imported goods and \u201creciprocal\u201d tariffs of up to 50% on goods from countries that had a large trade surplus with the U.S., like China. FedEx shares plunged 20% in the immediate aftermath. Since then, tariff levels on individual markets have swung wildly as Trump has granted exemptions, slapped further taxes on countries, and signed trade agreements. The average U.S. tariff rate is currently around 17%, up from 10% before April 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a dynamic environment. We just have to live with that,\u201d Subramaniam told analysts in June. In September, FedEx forecast that tariffs would lead to a $1 billion hit to operating profits for the current fiscal year, which ends May 31.<\/p>\n
Shares have recovered from the initial shock, rising more than 50% from April lows, as FedEx adapts to new trading relationships that skirt U.S. levies. (Shares ended 2025 up 3%, behind the broader S&P 500\u2019s 16% growth.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an element of re-globalization going on,\u201d Subramaniam says. \u201cThe China-U.S. lane is coming down, while Chinese trade to the rest of Asia is going up. You can even see Asia\u2013 Latin America trade going up. The mix of trade is evolving as we speak.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that up to one?third of global trade flows could be reconfigured by 2035, with trade between China and emerging markets, and among emerging economies themselves, remaining relatively resilient even under a scenario where China and advanced economies decouple. New trade corridors linking Asia with other major economies are poised to benefit from the diversion of goods.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Subramaniam says he\u2019s paying close attention to Asian markets like Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and India as bright spots, as exporters serve both U.S. consumers and other emerging markets.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing that [FedEx founder Fred Smith] taught me\u2026 is that change is part of our culture. He always used to say: \u2018If you don\u2019t like change, you will hate extinction.’\u201d<\/p>\n What Subramaniam learned from his mentor<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n This year, FedEx launched nonstop cargo flights between Guangzhou and the Malaysian state of Penang, a hub for semiconductor manufacturing. It has also pledged to build a 100,000-squarefoot logistics center, costing about $11 million, at Penang\u2019s airport. Other new or increased routes include those between Guangzhou and Bangkok, Paris and Guangzhou, Seoul and Hanoi, and Seoul and Taipei. It is opening new facilities in Thailand\u2019s Laem Chabang and Indonesia\u2019s Bali, and signed an agreement to help buzzy K-beauty retailer Olive Young with its global expansion.\u00a0<\/p>\n The U.S. isn\u2019t getting left out. The consumer there \u201cis the largest economic force on this planet,\u201d Subramaniam says, noting FedEx\u2019s new nonstop flight from Singapore to FedEx\u2019s hub in Anchorage, the only such cargo connection from the Southeast Asian country to the continental U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n Smith \u201cwas an empire builder, and a proponent of making the company bigger and bigger,\u201d says Bruce Chan, a logistics analyst at Stifel. \u201cWith investor pressure, and the changing global environment, Raj\u2019s focus has to shift from that quite a bit.\u201d Subramaniam is undertaking a big cost-cutting program, combining FedEx\u2019s ground and air networks, and spinning off FedEx Freight.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, the CEO is confident about the demand for FedEx\u2019s bread-and-butter operations. \u201cPeople want to trade and travel,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any going back.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Company revenue between March and November\u2014the period surrounding Liberation Day\u2014rose by 3.3% year on year, reaching $67.9 billion. Profits also rose 14% to reach $3.4 billion, beating expectations as the companywide cost-cutting effort seemed to bear fruit.\u00a0<\/p>\n FedEx\u2019s global expansion is in \u201cearly innings,\u201d Chan says. Most of FedEx\u2019s capacity and customers remain in the U.S., unlike, say, Germany\u2019s DHL, whose shares are up 40% in the past year. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take a very long time for FedEx to permanently pivot their focus to other geographies,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Subramaniam, 58, ended up working at FedEx by a stroke of luck that no CEO could easily replicate. The native of Thiruvananthapuram, a coastal city in southern India, elected to head to the U.S. for graduate studies in engineering and business. When his roommate ditched a job interview with FedEx, Subramaniam, needing a green card to remain in the U.S., showed up instead.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I walked into the interview, I told them upfront that I didn\u2019t have a green card. I asked if that would be an issue. They said, \u2018Son, let\u2019s get through the interview first, then we can discuss a green card,\u2019\u201d he recalled in a 2023 interview with the Horatio Alger Association. Subramaniam got a job as an associate analyst, based in Memphis; FedEx is the only company he\u2019s ever worked for.\u00a0<\/p>\n In turning to a FedEx lifer as CEO, the logistics firm joins the likes of Costco, Target, Walmart, and Nike, which have all recently chosen chief executives with decades-long company tenures.\u00a0<\/p>\n Subramaniam says his 30 years at FedEx give him a \u201cnatural advantage\u201d as CEO. \u201cA lot of people ask me how difficult it is to manage people in different parts of the world, with different cultures,\u201d he says. \u201cThe language of the country may be different, but the language of FedEx is the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult for someone to parachute in from outside and figure it out,\u201d he notes. And that person, of course, would not have learned the ropes from the man who built FedEx into what it is today<\/p>\n This article appears in the February\/March 2026: Asia issue of <\/em>Fortune with the headline \u201cHow FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam is adapting to the era of \u2018re-globalization’\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Fortune #Logo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam grad… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[624,7043,133,1243,10890,491],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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