“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” - Tariffs, probably

Well, well, well… look who woke up. The home a hand of Black Jack built (read: FedEx) delivered a solid fiscal first-quarter beatdown to Wall Street's lowball expectations, posting adjusted earnings of $3.83 per share versus the $3.59 analysts were expecting. Revenue clocked in at $22.24 billion, handily beating the $21.66 billion estimate. Translation: Not half bad for a company that moves 17 million packages daily through what CEO Raj Subramaniam calls their "resilient network"... which sounds way cooler than “a bunch of trucks and planes.” 

(Source: Giphy) 

However, while Wall Street is horned up… FedEx still told investors that 2026 may… or may not be a sh*t how. For instance, the company's full-year earnings forecast of $17.20 to $19 per share has a midpoint that's dancing dangerously close to… but slightly below…Wall Street's $18.21 expectation. 

(Source: CNBC) 

The problem? The death of the "de minimis" exception, aka the trade policy Trump single-handedly nuked. This century-old rule let packages under $800 waltz into the U.S. duty-free, and it was absolutely clutch for all those direct-to-consumer shipments from China that kept my wife's shopping addiction well-fed. That was, until Trump's administration killed this party favor in May for China and Hong Kong, then extended the buzzkill to all countries by late August. We're talking about roughly 1.4 billion packages annually that suddenly got a lot more expensive to ship… about three-quarters of which were coming from China.

Naturally, FedEx took a $150 million hit in the name of “politicians are making our lives difficult” in Q1 alone. So to compensate, FedEx completely rekt consumers with shipping fees, because someone has to pay for the trade war theater… and it ain’t going to be the fat cats. Still though, give credit where it’s due… FedEx's domestic game is strong. U.S. average daily volumes jumped 6% overall (up an additional 3% today), proving that Americans' insatiable appetite for next-day delivery of stuff they don't really need remains recession-proof. The company's been on a cost-cutting rampage since 2023, parking planes and closing facilities like they're Marie Kondo-ing their entire operation, with a $1 billion cost-savings target for fiscal 2026.

(Source: Giphy) 

Oh, and they're still planning to spin off FedEx Freight into its own publicly traded company by June 2026. Bigly. With that said though, where does this leave FedEx? Simple:  Caught between a rock (solid domestic demand) and a hard place (tariff headaches that make international shipping about as fun as airport security). They're projecting 4-6% revenue growth for 2026… which absolutely smokes Wall Street's pessimistic 1.2% estimate but the tariff clouds are definitely going to stand on business when it comes to FedEx’s bottom line. 

So yeah, in the end, FedEx is still the king of moving your stuff from Point A to Point B, but even they can't overnight deliver a solution to Washington's trade policy pissing matches. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.