FedEx started as a Yale term paper that failed to impress its professor
As a Yale student, Frederick Smith wrote a paper proposing a delivery network built specifically for urgent packages. His professor was unimpressed. Smith pressed ahead anyway, founding Federal Express in 1971 and beginning flights two years later. Within a decade the company was earning a billion dollars a year.
The company was incorporated in Little Rock, Arkansas, but Smith moved operations to Memphis when flying began in 1973. He chose its airport because Memphis sat close to the average population centre of the United States and enjoyed calm weather. The city remains the heart of the operation, with nearly all air freight funnelling through its giant hub.
Growth was unusually organic. By 1983 the firm had reached a billion dollars in revenue without a single merger or acquisition, rare for a startup, and it expanded into Europe and Asia the following year. In 1988 it bought its rival Flying Tiger Line, creating the world's biggest full-service cargo airline. Customers had long called it FedEx, and in 1994 the company officially adopted the nickname.
A holding company formed in 1997 and bought Caliber System, adding ground parcels, expedited freight and logistics to the express business. In 2000 everything was rebranded under the FedEx name: the old airline became FedEx Express and the RPS parcel service became FedEx Ground. In 2004 it bought the copy shop chain Kinko's to give ordinary customers somewhere to walk in, later renaming the stores FedEx Office.
Expansion abroad continued with the 2015 purchase of the Dutch rival TNT Express for 4.4 billion euros. FedEx has also made notable exits: in 2019 it walked away from an 850 million dollar contract to carry Amazon's domestic express parcels, then stopped its ground deliveries too. Amazon had made up just 1.3 percent of revenue the year before. The company now ranks 59th on the Fortune 500.
Source: FedEx
