FedEx’s Frederick W Smith: 1944–2025

Frederick Smith (80), businessman, founder, director and chairman of the supervisory board of the Federal Express Corporation (FedEx) died this weekend. He was 80 years old.

Smith followed the family tradition of being entrepreneurial and founded FedEx on 18 June 1971. He deployed his family’s inheritance and raised approximately USD 690-million (in today’s value) through a venture capital scheme to start the firm. Initially, the company had 14 jets to service 25 cities. This grew to 560,000 employees in 220 countries by 2022.

Smith’s vision of overnight shipping with the help of brown box packaging led to the creation of FedEx. The company revolutionised packaging and letter delivery. Its USP was the overnight delivery of letters and goods. Most of these were delivered in a quintessential corrugated brown box or envelopes.

Smith was born in Mississippi in 1944 and served in the Marines in the 1960s, including two tours in Vietnam. He attended Yale, but as he said in an interview in 2023, he learned "more about the principles to run FedEx from the Marines than at the Ivy League school."

FedEx is a global business leader that has pushed business and logistical boundaries to become a worldwide trendsetter in shipping, particularly in overnight packages.