FedEx is expecting a lot of holiday shipping traffic this year — a lot.
The package shipping giant told industry analysts earlier this week that it expects to ship a record number of packages this year, according to Retail Dive.
If that holds true, it will be the second straight year that FedEx’s holiday traffic breaks records.
FedEx said it intends to hire 50,000 seasonal employees this year to help it cope with holiday traffic, which is the same number of employees it hired last year for the holiday crunch.
“The rapid growth of eCommerce has driven significant shifts in demand over the last several years. Last year, we experienced 15 percent growth in peak season volume and delivered more than 325 million packages,” T. Michael Glenn, FedEx’s executive vice president of market development and corporate communications, told analysts, according to Seeking Alpha‘s transcript of its Q1 2017 earnings call. “Holiday promotions and buying patterns have increasingly shifted, which has resulted in heavy demand for package delivery on Mondays during the peak. The intensity for demand on Monday has accelerated in recent years, as more and more retail locations have started serving as fulfillment centers for eCommerce orders. We expect each of the four Mondays during the upcoming peak period to be among the busiest in our company’s history.”
During the same talk with analysts, FedEx also reported $14.7 billion in revenue and a $715 million profit for its first fiscal quarter of 2017. Those numbers were a jump in revenue from $12.3 billion during the same quarter last year and $692 million in profit from the same period.
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