“India is a very important market
for us for three reasons,” FedEx global CEO Raj Subramaniam said in an
interview. “Firstly, India’s GDP continues to grow – India’s share of
manufacturing in the world is going to continue to grow. Two, India is a
significant source of talent. We launched our advanced capability community
(ACC) just a few months ago. We announced partnerships with IIT Bombay and
Chennai.”
The ACC in Hyderabad will serve as a hub for the company’s technological
and digital innovation, it had said in December.
“And third, one of the exciting things that’s happening in India is the
digitisation and the number of technology ideas that are sprouting from India,”
he said. “It is quite exciting to see… we are watching that very carefully to
see if there are opportunities for FedEx to participate in those as well.”
High demand and rising personal incomes in the bigger cities continue to
make India a big offsetting factor against the global slump in demand that
FedEx and other logistics companies across the world are facing.
While FedEx has seen a slowdown and even a decline in revenue in some quarters,
it has managed to stay profitable with stringent cost cutting and restructuring
initiatives across functions. A senior executive at the company said it
continues to expand operations in India.
“So right now, we have gateways in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore in India,
and in Africa, in Johannesburg and in Nairobi. Our idea would be that as much
connectivity as we can bring to this region, we would try to bring as we see
the volumes develop,” said Kami Viswanathan, president, Middle East, Indian
Subcontinent and Africa at FedEx. In February, FedEx opened a Dubai hub, on
which it’s investing $350 million.
Subramaniam said the kind of
supply chain disruptions that have been occurring aren’t new.
“If you look back in history about supply chain patterns, there have
always been perturbations in supply chains,” he said. “But because of systems
like ours and the technology, those perturbations have been relatively muted
even through 2008. The pandemic changed that dynamic.”From pre-pandemic levels
to now, the company’s compounded annual growth rate has been about 6.2%, he
said. “Which is quite similar to what we
have seen in our (business) organically over the last 25 years,” he added.