FedEx Corp.’s shares tracked their worst day on Friday after the delivery heavyweight pulled its forecast, feeding into fears of a global demand slowdown while piling more pressure on its new chief executive for a quick turnaround.
The preliminary results sent the stock tumbling 24 percent to about $155.95, with the company poised to shed about $12.5 billion in market capitalization.
The gloomy outlook comes amid investor anxiety that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s rapid pace of interest rate hikes to tame soaring inflation threatens to tip the economy into a recession.
“We suspect that headwinds from an inflation-fatigued U.S. economy, a resource-constrained European economy, and second-order effects from lockdowns in China proved too much to overcome,” Cowen analyst Helane Becker said….