By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – FedEx stock (NYSE:FDX) rose 2% Monday as the company predicted a bumper holiday season.
A company official told CNBC that Monday will be its busiest day of the 2021 holiday season.
“We’ve seen a lot of people actually starting their Christmas shopping in the month of October, which is fundamentally different than we have seen traditionally in the past,” Ryan Kelly, vice president of global e-commerce at FedEx told CNBC.
According to the business news channel, FedEx estimates it will deliver 100 million more packages this time than it did from Black Friday to Christmas in pre-Covid 2019 and 10% more than the pandemic-driven record 2020 season.
Kelly told CNBC the “ship from store” trend, now being adopted with many retail chains like Target (NYSE:TGT) and Walmart (NYSE:WMT) now, has cut down the load on shipping networks.
FedEx had earlier said it would raise its shipping rates during the holiday season. The company’s first-quarter revenue came in at $19.3 billion, around 12% lower than a year earlier, affected by supply chain issues and a labor crunch.
The company had lowered its forecast in September, pegging the current-year EPS at around $18.87 at the midpoint of its guidance range, compared to a previous midpoint of $19.40.