BRIEF BACKGROUND[1] Owned by Frederick W. Smith, the company was incorporated in June 1971 and officially began operations on April 17, 1973, with the launch of 14 small aircraft from Memphis International Airport. It soon entered its maturing phase in the first half of the 1980s and grown to become the largest operating company in the FedEx family, handling about 3.2 million packages and documents every business day. During the fiscal year 2006, it netted a revenue of $21.4 billion (includes FedEx Trade Networks) and is currently employing more than 139,000 employees worldwide, serving in more than 220 countries and territories and 375 airports worldwide. David Bronczek is the current President and CEO of the well-known express transportation company. Since its inception, FedEx had transformed itself from an express delivery company to a global logistics and supply-chain management company.
SWOT ANALYSIS
STRENGTHS
With more than three decades of experience in providing logistics services to individuals and fellow businesses, FedEx has the strength of dependable know-how in the delivery business. They changed the nature of delivery business by reconfiguring outbound logistics (a primary activity) and human resource management (a support activity) to originate the overnight delivery business, creating value in the process. Convinced that customers would value not only overnight deliveries but also the ability to track them, FedEx developed a proprietary computerised tracking system called Customer Oriented Services and Management Operating System, or COSMOS (Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson 2003), which introduced computer technology to the shipping industry in previously unheard-of ways and permanently altered the nature of competition within it. Over the years, the company had also invested heavily in IT systems, providing them with a powerful technical architecture that had the potential to pioneer in Internet commerce.