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TL;DR
Top News of the Week: FedEx hired two thousand people to fill out customs paperwork. That is what the tariff regime actually cost, in headcount, at one company.
From Last Week’s News: Uber is paying about $14B for Delivery Hero, and the number that justifies it appears in Uber's own press release. Cross-platform users generate roughly three times the gross bookings of single-product users. That multiple is the entire deal.
Weekly Look Ahead: Alphabet, Albertsons, and Tractor Supply announce earnings this week.

TOP NEWS OF THE WEEK
FedEx Knows Everything. Now It Has to Sell It.
Raj Subramaniam gave Fortune a number that deserves more attention than the headline it generated. FedEx moves about 18M packages a day, and by his account that traffic throws off two petabytes of data every 24 hours. He calls the company the referendum on global supply chains. It is a good line. The harder question is whether a referendum can be monetized.
His argument for 2025 being the strangest year in his 35 years is specific rather than atmospheric. US imports down. US exports up. Intra-regional volume climbing, with Latin America inbound and Southeast Asia and India growing fast. He has a name for it, reglobalization, which he says he coined himself. Naming a thing is not the same as being positioned for it, but FedEx has a decent claim here. If a shipper was moving goods from A to B and now moves them from P to Q, FedEx already sits at all four letters. That is what 53 years of network buildout buys you.
The customs point is the one I keep circling. Subramaniam says the number of packages requiring formal clearance rose six or sevenfold, and FedEx hired roughly two thousand people to handle it. Read that plainly. Tariff complexity became a hiring event. He frames it as an advantage because expertise is scarce, and he is probably right. But an advantage that costs two thousand headcount is a margin story before it is a moat story, and the interview does not tell us which way that trade nets out.
Then comes the pivot every logistics operator is attempting right now. FedEx wants to sell route optimization, predictive maintenance, and customs clearance as products. There is a Dun & Bradstreet partnership and work with ServiceNow. Subramaniam points to $1.8T of inefficiency sitting in global supply chains and suggests FedEx can take a piece of it. That figure is his, not an audited market. Healthcare is at nearly $10B in revenue, which is real and growing, but healthcare is transportation revenue won partly on the strength of visibility tools. It is not software revenue. Nobody has broken out what the data layer earns on its own, and until somebody does, the intelligence business is a story attached to a trucking business.
Meanwhile the operational work is unglamorous and unfinished. Network 2.0 is 45% complete against a fall 2027 target, with 65% expected by year end. Aurora has logged 700k autonomous miles for FedEx with a safety driver still in the seat, and highway point-to-point is where it starts. Dexterity handles truck loading, Berkshire Grey the unloading, which Subramaniam describes as an extremely hard robotics problem now solvable. Those are the only parts of the big surface hubs a human still touches
THE BIG IDEA
So FedEx has the data, the network, and a founder-built culture it is careful not to disturb. What it does not yet have is proof that anyone outside FedEx will pay for what FedEx knows. Freight is now trading on its own with a first earnings call ahead. That print will tell us more about the next two years than the petabytes will.
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THE TRUTH ABOUT LAST WEEK:
Uber Paid $14B for a 3x Multiple
Uber is offering €41.50 per share in cash for Delivery Hero, an implied equity value of €14.8B, or $13.7B adjusted for the stake it already holds. Prosus has irrevocably committed its ~17%, taking Uber's total economic interest to roughly 53%. Closing is expected in the second half of 2027, subject to BaFin approval and merger control clearances.
Delivery Hero is separately selling 14 markets to SSW Partners for about $1.6B, covering $11B in 2025 gross bookings, mostly where Uber Eats and Delivery Hero already overlap. Uber keeps 50 markets and $42B. The combined platform spans 99 markets and $236B in pro-forma 2025 gross bookings.
Uber says the deal nearly doubles the markets where it offers both mobility and delivery, from 34 to 58, and that cross-platform users generate roughly 3x the gross bookings and profits of single-product users. The company expects accretion to Non-GAAP EPS at close and high-single-digit accretion by year three.
Financing comes from cash and new debt, with a committed bridge facility of about €14B, leverage held below 2x, and buybacks unchanged. Uber has pledged to keep the Berlin headquarters and hold the workforce there steady until at least 2029, plus €2B of German investment over five years.
$14B buys Uber something it has been circling for years. Not food delivery. Frequency.
The number worth staring at is the one Uber put in its own rationale: cross-platform users generate roughly three times the gross bookings of single-product users. That is the whole thesis. Uber is paying a premium to convert 65 countries of standalone food orders into Uber One members who also take rides. Whether that conversion happens at anything close to the rate Uber assumes is the open question, and nobody will know until 2028 at the earliest.
The SSW carve-out tells you where Uber expects regulatory trouble. $11B in gross bookings, sold to a financial buyer who will resell it, in exactly the markets where Uber Eats and Delivery Hero compete head to head. That is a pre-emptive concession, structured before Brussels asks.
WHY IT MATTERS
Niklas Östberg's framing was blunt. Food delivery is scale dependent, and it is hard to build that scale from a European base. Fifteen years of Delivery Hero ends with an American buyer and a Berlin headquarters guaranteed only through 2029.
Closing is eighteen months out. A lot of regulators get a vote between now and then.
WEEKLY LOOKAHEAD:
WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK
Wednesday, July 22nd: Alphabet Earnings (After the close)
The number that matters for commerce is not cloud but whether retail advertisers are still paying up for search as buying behavior moves into AI answers.
Thursday, July 23rd: Albertsons Earnings (Before the open)
First quarter of a fiscal year that just started, and the question is whether digital sales growth is still outrunning identical sales by the same wide margin it has been.
Thursday, July 23rd: Tractor Supply Earnings (Before the close)
Rural discretionary spend has held up longer than most people expected, so the comp number here is a read on a consumer that big-box results keep missing.

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