US parcel giants FedEx and UPS are gearing up to cope with the seasonal peak in volumes over thecoming week but have refrained from releasing their usual volume predictions due to the slump in
the US economy.FedEx said that today (December 15) is likely to be its busiest day of the year, with 290,000staff and contractors at work and 672 aircraft in operation to transport parcels via its Memphissuper-hub for delivery across the USA and around the world. The company expects to sort 139packages per second during the day, while it will process almost 5,000 online tracking requests perminute during the whole month.
But it did not make any forecast about total volumes for the Christmas 2008 season. FedExwill release Q2 (September-November) results on December 18. On last year’s peak day (December 17),FedEx Express handled about five million packages while FedEx Express and FedEx Ground togetherhandled about 11.3 million packages that day. The normal daily combined volume (2007) was aboutseven million packages.
UPS said in November that it expects its overall busiest day to be December 18, while itsbusiest day for air packages is likely to be December 22. Similarly, it did not make any forecastsfor end-of-year volumes. Last year, UPS delivered about 22 million packages on its peak day(December 19), and delivered some 5.6 million air packages on December 21.
Over the first nine months of this year, UPS recorded a 1.7% drop in its US domestic packagesto just over 13 million (average daily volume) but a 4.1% rise in international packages to 1.9million (average daily volume).
