I had the good fortune to live and work in China about 10 years ago. It was (and is) one of the most challenging and dynamic countries in the world -- and I have worked in quite a few countries in my 34 years with FedEx!
Much has changed in China over the years, but our commitment to China never has. The newly opened Asia Pacific hub in Guangzhou, China is the latest milestone for FedEx -- it is now our largest hub outside of the U.S.
It's 22:23 MEM time and Krista has just returned home. She has been gone for four days and the good news is she is 17 minutes earlier than we expected her. During her absence she has been to Ancorage, Alaska, Seoul, South Korea, Hong Kong, Subic Bay in the Phillipines, Singapore and her last stop was in Osaka, Japan.
One of our core values at FedEx is community involvement. One of the ways FedEx gets involved is through our support of the United Way. At FedEx, we ensure every new employee understands as a member of FedEx we want you to get involved. We encourage you to make a difference just like FedEx makes a difference in each of our lives.
At the HUB, we have about 8,000 employees who "handle" packages. Most of these are part time employees working less than 20 hours per week. We just completed our annual United Way drive and for the HUB alone we raised over $500,000.
It's 1:45 a.m. and on a Saturday morning and I am at the center of FedEx's World HUB. For those of you not familiar with the terminology, the World HUB is FedEx's original package sort facility in MEM which sorts over 1.4 mm packages a night. Tonight there are about 12,000 employees here who will take care of our customers shipments while most of our customers are sleeping.
I was fortunate to start here as a hourly employee 28 years ago and through hard work and our great promotion from within philosophy I am now the Vice President of this facility. This is home for me.
