A standalone FedEx Freight will have winning more small-business customers as its top priorities, Chief Customer Officer Brie Carere told a recent investment bank conference.
Also high on the list of growth initiatives: Adding to the less-than-truckload group’s e-commerce business and building share in the market serving grocery stores. In addition, executives speaking at the Bank of America Industrials, Transportation & Airlines Key Leaders Conference on May 12 said they intend to beef up the LTL business’s technology foundations as a way to improve their billing and customers’ experience.
Memphis-based FedEx Corp.—No. 1 on the 2025 FleetOwner 500 list of for-hire carriers—plans to spin off its LTL division in 2026, setting up on its own an operation that has about 30,000 power units and which handled roughly 85,000 shipments per day in its most recent fiscal quarter. The parent company’s leaders this week said that John Smith, the leader of Federal Express’ U.S. and Canadian operations, will be president and CEO of an independent FedEx Freight.
Carere and CFO John Dietrich told the BofA event audience that the opportunity to grow FedEx Freight’s small-business customer base stems partly from upgrading the group’s billing experience and pricing transparency.
“It actually goes to a little bit of the prioritization issue that we had,” Carere said of Freight’s place within the broader FedEx enterprise. “From a FedEx Freight perspective, we did a really good job, but it was competing with FedEx Ground for a lot of investment on the IT side. So in hindsight, we probably underinvested. So we’re going to fix that, give them a better experience.”
Growing on the e-commerce and grocery fronts, Carere said, will need to be about growing faster than the market. Work with e-commerce providers today accounts for about 10% of FedEx Freight’s revenues, and grocery hasn’t been a focus until now.
“We’ve got a pretty good handle on where we can kind of profitably take the next couple of points of share,” Carere said of those categories.
Preparing to lead those efforts is Smith (pictured at right), who has been with FedEx for more than a quarter-century (he is not related to FedEx founder Fred Smith) and who ran FedEx Freight from 2018 until 2021. Alongside his appointment, FedEx also named Brad Martin, vice chairman of its board of directors, to lead the future FedEx Freight board.
“I cannot think of two individuals with more knowledge of, or commitment to, the long-term success of the FedEx Freight business than John Smith and Brad Martin,” Raj Subramaniam, FedEx’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “Together, they have the track record and expertise to successfully lead this new and exciting chapter for the independent FedEx Freight company.”
