FedEx stock jumped on news of an executive change Tuesday morning, while shares of UPS flirted with breakout ahead of a Google Cloud announcement.
Late Monday, FedEx announced that founder Fred Smith will step aside as chief executive.
Current President and COO Raj Subramaniam takes over as CEO-elect immediately. Subramaniam, 56, joined the shipping and logistics company 30 years ago.
Under Smith, FedEx grew its annual revenue to $92 billion. In 2019, FedEx famously tangled with customer Amazon as the e-commerce giant grew its industry disrupting delivery model.
As executive chairman, Smith will focus on sustainability, innovation and policy, the release said.
Later on Tuesday, UPS is due to announce an expansion of its 2019 deal with Alphabet's Google Cloud.
As part of the expansion, UPS will receive increased network, storage and compute capacity, The Wall Street Journal reported.
UPS will continue using Google's artificial-intelligence (AI) tools to analyze its data, which is expected to surge as the delivery giant puts radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on packages.
Google Cloud vies with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure for enterprise sales.
The companies declined to comment on the size of the capacity increase or the value of the deal.
UPS Stock, FedEx Stock
FedEx stock rose 3.7%, to 238.57, on the stock market today. Shares regained the 50-day moving average for the first time in more than a month. They remain about 5% below their downward trending 200-day average.
Shares of UPS rose 1.3% to 222.45 Tuesday. UPS stock briefly topped what MarketSmith chart analysis notes as a 222.67 buy point. Amazon shares edged up 0.2%. Alphabet gained 0.7%.
Amazon still relies on third-party carriers to handle some deliveries. Those carriers include UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service. But Amazon has invested heavily to grow its delivery fleet of planes, trucks and vans, challenging those partners.
In November, Amazon told CNBC that it expects to deliver more packages than UPS or FedEx in the U.S. by early 2022.
