Category: UPS News

UPS sports attractively priced premiums at the moment, too

United Parcel Service, Inc. (NYSE:UPS) is up 0.9% to trade at $205.58 this morning, after the shipping giant earned an upgrade from Citigroup to “buy” from “neutral,” and a price-target hike to $250 from $245. The analyst in question noted the company’s strong domestic growth prospects, and that UPS is now moving to reduce risks associated with Amazon.com (AMZN) being one of its largest customers.

Analysts were evenly split towards the equity coming into today, with 10 sporting a “strong buy” rating, while the remaining 10 said “hold” or worse. Meanwhile, the 12-month consensus target price of $230.91 is a 12.6% premium to the stock’s current perch.

The next phase of the U.S. Covid vaccination distribution effort will be challenging, the president of UPS Healthcare told CNBC, as Tuesday marks one year since the initial shipments.

“The manufacturers are starting to think about how they change the formulation,” said Wes Wheeler, who leads the vaccine logistics effort for the global carrier. “When that happens, inventory becomes an issue, logistics becomes an issue and basically performance becomes an issue.”

“There will be potentially more vaccines that have to be returned or destroyed because they are not used and they are kept in storage beyond their shelf life,” he added. “I think that is the next phase for us, to handle that as well as we can.”

UPS Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Laura Lane says the delivery company wants to grow its efficiency in green ways “because we’re seeing that our customers, our suppliers and … our employees all want to be part of the solution” in addressing the challenges of climate change.

Atlanta-based UPS says it will be carbon neutral by the year 2050. It’s just one piece of the shipping giant’s ESG transformation. ESG, which stands for “environmental, social and governance,” are criteria for how potential investors screen how well a company is treating the environment, their employees, their suppliers, the communities where they operate and more.

UPS Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Laura Lane joined All Things Considered host Rickey Bevington to discuss the company’s climate change goals and ESG efforts.

UPS Principal Scientist Ranganath Nuggehalli discussed holiday supply chain challenges in a new interview released by INFORMS. He also discusses what the shipping carrier is doing to anticipate and respond to the challenges.

Nuggehalli said UPS processes about 20 million packages per day on average, but during the holiday season, it jumps significantly – sometimes nearly doubling. Last year, it went up to about 34 million packages per day. “It becomes a challenge because it’s a physical network. So, you have to have enough resources, both physical capacity, people, vehicles, everything to service added capacity.”

Planning is key, Nuggehalli said, and that begins right away each January. He also said working with customers is key, especially main customers like Amazon, to collaborate and anticipate demand.