When the global economy is about to go haywire, few people are better positioned to read the signals than Raj Subramaniam.
The FedEx CEO presides over an operation that moves roughly 18 million packages globally and generates two petabytes of data every day. The company connects 3 million shippers to 225 million consumers across 220 countries and territories.
“We are the referendum on global supply chains,” Subramaniam told me in June, when I interviewed him at FedEx’s headquarters in Memphis for Fortune’s Titans podcast.
“I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I’ve never seen a change in one year like we’ve seen in 2025.”
FedEx’s data shows, in real time, the geopolitical reordering sparked by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and, this year, the war in Iran: U.S. imports went down, while U.S. exports went up. In Latin America, Southeast Asia, and India, FedEx experienced rapid growth.
