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Welcome to Friday! Today we’re covering the drop in retail packages being shipped and what that means for the broader retail economy. We also talk about Tesla's move to larger facilities, as well as the 18 year old that hacked Uber…completely.
- FedEX is closing locations and parking aircraft after volumes of packages drops significantly, sounding the alarm on reduced retail spending
- Revenue at FedEx Ground, which mostly handles e-commerce deliveries in the U.S., was about $300 million below company forecasts.
- Shares are down 19% in off hours trading this morning as CEO Raj Subramaniam, announced actions to reduce costs by freezing hiring, closing 90 FedEx Office locations, parking some cargo aircraft, reducing Sunday ground operations and closing five corporate offices. No layoffs were announced
- “People are buying less. They are paying more for air travel and other experiences,” said Satish Jindel, president of research firm SJ Consulting Group.
- Tesla has been showing signs of moving away from small retail boutiques and toward “Tesla Centers” which look and feel a lot more like the Dealership experience.
- Last year they announced the closing of multiple high-rent spaces but continued hiring sales associates as they looked for lower rent areas to put focus on larger facilities that house service and deliveries to support remote management of the test drive fleet
- Sources familiar with the matter say there has been success with this strategy and the company is now moving the “Tesla Center” strategy to it’s Chinese market
- Investments in the service experience have been increasing as CEO Elon Musk has made improvements to service a primary goal for the company who is delivering record numbers of vehicles
- Uber suffered a systemic hack by a teen. Employees thought it was a joke.
- The alleged hacker, who claims to be an 18-year old, says they have administrator access to company tools including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The New York Times reports that the ride-hailing business has taken multiple internal systems, including Slack, offline while it investigates the breach.
- The hacker who goes by the Telegram handle “Teapot” posted the message, “I announce I am a hacker and Uber has suffered a data breach,” on slack and was responded to by employees with popcorn emojis, the “It’s happening” gif, and was accompanied by multiple interactions with other employees
- An employee was social engineered an employee, was able to login to their VPN and scan the network resulting in From there, they found PowerShell scripts on Uber’s intranet containing access management credentials that allowed them to allegedly breach Uber’s AWS and G Suite accounts. It is a total breach
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Join Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier every morning for the Automotive State of the Union podcast as they connect the dots across car dealerships, retail trends, emerging tech like AI, and cultural shifts—bringing clarity, speed, and people-first insight to automotive leaders navigating a rapidly changing industry.
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