Decades of experience inform the Smith CEO school curriculum. He first envisioned a system for the urgent, late-night delivery of an economics paper at Yale. Smith ran the idea, launched Federal Express in 1971, and grew it into a global logistics giant with $90.1 billion in revenue in the past 12 months.

For his first three years as CEO, Subramaniam worked with Smith as executive chairman, but Smith died in June at age 80, leaving Subramaniam without his mentor—and FedEx without its founder—for the first time.

Part of Smith’s legacy is FedEx, now a Fortune Global 500 company that moves about $2 trillion worth of commerce annually; handles 17 million packages a day; and operates 400 daily flights from hubs such as Memphis, Guangzhou, Singapore, Paris, and Dubai. But it’s also the big lesson he taught Subramaniam, which the CEO took last year when the Trump administration’s global tariffs threatened FedEx’s core business of moving goods around the world. “One thing Fred taught me…is that change is part of our culture,” Subramaniam recalled. “He always said: ‘If you don’t like change, you hate extinction.'”

The biggest change in Subramaniam’s CEO tenure is the day the tariffs hit, April 2, 2025, or “Liberty Day” as the White House considers it. Trump has imposed a minimum 10% tariff on imported goods and “reciprocal” tariffs of up to 50% on products from countries with large US trade surpluses, such as China. FedEx shares fell 20% immediately afterward. Since then, tariff levels in individual markets have fluctuated wildly as Trump has granted exemptions, slapped additional taxes on countries, and signed trade deals. The average US tariff rate is currently around 17%, up from 10% before April 2025.

“It’s a dynamic environment. We just have to live with that,” Subramaniam told analysts in June. In September, FedEx predicted the tariffs would lead to a $1 billion hit to operating profits for the current fiscal year, which ends May 31.

Shares have recovered from the initial shock, rising more than 50% from April’s low, as FedEx adjusts to new trade relations wearing US taxes. (Shares ended 2025 up 3%, behind the broader S&P 500’s 16% gain.)

“There is an element of re-globalization going on,” Subramaniam said. “The China-US lane is going down, while China’s trade with the rest of Asia is going up. You can even see Asia–Latin America trade going up. The trade mix is ​​improving as we speak.”

the McKinsey The Global Institute estimates that up to a third of world trade flows could be reconfigured by 2035, with trade between China and emerging markets, and among the developing economies themselves, remaining relatively stable even under a scenario where China and the advanced economies separate. New trade corridors linking Asia with other major economies are poised to benefit from the transfer of goods.

Subramaniam says he sees Asian markets like Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and India as bright spots, as exporters serve consumers in the US and other emerging markets.

This year, FedEx launched non-stop cargo flights between Guangzhou and the Malaysian state of Penang, a hub for semiconductor manufacturing. It also promises to build a 100,000-squarefoot logistics center, costing about $11 million, at the Penang airport. Other new or added routes include between Guangzhou and Bangkok, Paris and Guangzhou, Seoul and Hanoi, and Seoul and Taipei. It opened new facilities in Laem Chabang in Thailand and Bali in Indonesia, and signed a deal to help buzzy K-beauty retailer Olive Young with its global expansion.

The US cannot be left behind. The consumer there “is the biggest economic force on this planet,” Subramaniam said, announcing FedEx’s new nonstop flight from Singapore to the FedEx hub in Anchorage, the only cargo connection from the Southeast Asian country to the continental US.

Smith is “an empire builder, and a proponent of making the company bigger,” said Bruce Chan, a logistics analyst at Stifel. “With investor pressure, and the changing global environment, Raj’s focus needs to shift away from that a little bit.” Subramaniam created a massive cost reduction program, integrating FedEx’s ground and air networks, and turning around FedEx Freight.

Still, the CEO is bullish about demand for FedEx’s bread-and-butter operations. “People want to shop and travel,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any going back.”

The company’s revenue between March and November—the period surrounding Independence Day—increased 3.3% year over year, reaching $67.9 billion. Profits also rose 14% to reach $3.4 billion, beating expectations as a company-wide cost-cutting effort appeared to be paying off.

FedEx’s global expansion is in the “early innings,” Chan said. Most of FedEx’s capacity and customers remain in the US, unlike, say, Germany’s DHL, whose shares rose 40% last year. “It took a long time for FedEx to permanently shift their focus to other geographies,” he said.

Subramaniam, 58, landed a job at FedEx through a stroke of luck that no CEO can easily emulate. The native of Thiruvananthapuram, a coastal city in southern India, chose to go to the US for graduate studies in engineering and business. When his roommate left a FedEx job interview, Subramaniam, who needed a green card to stay in the US, showed up instead.

“When I went into the interview, I told them up front that I didn’t have a green card. I asked if this was an issue. They said, ‘Son, let’s do the interview first, then we can talk about a green card,'” 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 works for.

With the return of a FedEx lifer as CEO, the logistics firm joined the likes Costco, Batas, Walmartand Nikewhich recently elected chief executives with decades-long management of the company.

Subramaniam says his 30 years at FedEx give him a “natural advantage” as CEO. “Many people ask me how difficult it is to manage people in different parts of the world, with different cultures,” he said. “The language of the country may be different, but the language of FedEx is the same.

“It’s very difficult for someone to parachute in from the outside and figure it out,” he said. And that person, of course, couldn’t learn the ropes from the person who built FedEx into what it is today

This article appears in the February/March 2026: Asia issue of luck with the headline “How FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam is adapting to the era of ‘re-globalization'”