The Postal Service’s Problems Are Good News—for UPS and FedEx

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The Postal Service’s Problems Are Good News—for UPS and FedEx - Barron's

The U.S. Postal Service—an organization older than the country—is getting more press than it wants as the fight over mail-in ballots and the organization’s funding heats up.

The post office is a secret giant. If it were publicly traded it would be worth, very roughly, $50 billion, making it the third largest non-rail logistics company by value in America. It generates about $71 billion in annual sales in 2019, just short of UPS’s $76 billion in sales and a touch higher than FedEx’s $69 billion.

The USPS has a funding problem, however. Even though the parcel business is booming, the marketing mail business is being badly hurt by the downturn. If the Postal Service were a publicly traded company, it would simply exit the mail business. It can’t, for obvious reasons.
 
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