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UPS reported Q2 2026 earnings this morning. A few things shippers should pay attention to: 📦 Volume is still down - but the mix is shifting for good. ADV fell 3.3% Y/Y to 16.0M pieces. The 18-month Amazon glide-down is now complete, removing ~2M lower-yielding packages per day. UPS says incremental volume from here comes from higher-quality freight: SMB, Healthcare, Industrial, and Automotive. 💰 Revenue-per-piece is outpacing cost-per-piece - and by a real margin. In U.S. Domestic, RPP grew 130 bps faster than cost per piece Y/Y. Operating margin hit 8.0%, up 100 bps Y/Y and a full 400 bps sequentially from 1Q26. Consolidated revenue came in at $22.8B (+7.6% Y/Y), non-GAAP adj. operating profit $2.1B (+12.0%), EPS $1.76 vs $1.55. ⛽ Fuel is doing heavier lifting on RPP than shippers may realize. RPP grew 9.3% in the first half - roughly half from fuel, half from mix/rate improvements. Internationally, RPP was up 18.9%, with more than half of that coming from fuel. Notably, UPS is leaning into fuel as a growth lever right now, while FedEx talked it down on their last call. That divergence matters for how each carrier frames surcharge language heading into contract season. 🎯 The Amazon Shipping question got a non-answer. When asked directly about competition from Amazon's own shipping network, Tomé didn't name the competitor. Instead she leaned on relationship depth at the C-suite level with shippers and UPS's industry-leading on-time delivery performance. Reasonable talking points - but notably not an answer to the actual question. Worth watching how long "trust and reliability" holds as a strategy if Amazon Shipping keeps taking share at the low end of the market. 💵 Balance sheet remains solid. $3.1B in cash from operations YTD, $4.7B cash on hand, no outstanding commercial paper, $2.7B in dividends paid. 📅 Full-year guidance raised on the back of 1H strength. Revenue now guided to ~$91.2B and non-GAAP adj. EPS to ~$7.22 - both moved up from the prior outlook. What this means for shippers: → Fuel is a stated lever for UPS's revenue growth, not just a pass-through cost - scrutinize fuel mechanism language closely in your next negotiation. → RPP beating CPP by 130 bps is UPS's proof that price discipline is working. Don't expect broad-based discounting to return unless you have a solid negotiating strategy in place. → Low-yield, Amazon-style volume is gone (for now). If your profile looks like SMB, Healthcare, Industrial, or Automotive, you have more leverage than you think. → Watch the gap between UPS's fuel messaging and FedEx's more conservative tone - that divergence is a lever shippers can use at the table. → Amazon Shipping is the elephant in the room UPS won't name. If you have volume Amazon could plausibly take, that's your leverage - use it. Uncomfortable with that? Start small, and let Amazon prove it while sending the message to the legacy carriers.

Breaking news: FedEx announced 2026 Peak Season Demand Surcharges. See below for what shippers need to know. Put together by our strategic parcel services team member, Luke Larson

After the GRI's were announced last year, you negotiated a discount on additional handling. In January, FedEx added cubic volume as a trigger on the 12th, UPS on the 26th. That's a metaphor for how this entire year unfolded, and what to likely expect going forward. Fuel tables skyrocketed in April and again in May. Rounding rules changed how dimensions get calculated before the surcharge math runs. Surcharge definitions expanded. All outside of the standard GRI announcement that comes once a year. Planning against the single announced GRI percentage is no longer feasible, nor all that helpful. To prepare for the GRIs and peak season coming soon, we recommend two things: 1. Build your budget off your own trailing twelve months. Your effective cost per package over the last year already contains every off-cycle change the carriers made. 2. Negotiate the rules and not only the rates. Ask what happens when a definition changes mid-term. Ask whether your accessorial discounts apply to a redefined trigger or to the trigger as it read the day you signed. Ask for notice periods and caps on accessorial increases. And if you're looking for more in depth help, feel free to send us a DM. If you have other tips, drop them in the comments for all the other parcel shippers!

It's 2026, your logistics data shouldn't take three weeks and an IT ticket to answer a simple question. Introducing, Loop Intelligence. It's the analytics and reporting layer built into the Loop Logistics Data Platform, and it runs on the same validated data that powers your audits and payments, refreshed daily. So the number you see is the number you can act on. The AI Assistant typically perks the most ears, and for good reason. Ask a question in plain English, get a data-backed answer. No SQL, no export, no waiting on a report request. But it's one piece of a bigger toolkit: → Alert Center lets you set a threshold on any metric and get notified only when something crosses it. Think a carrier's overcharge rate breaking 5%, or a lane's on-time performance dropping below 90%. No inbox flooded with reports nobody reads → Custom report builder with a drag-and-drop interface. Filter by mode, carrier, lane, date, or any dimension in your data, then save it, share it, or schedule it to your inbox → Vendor Billing Scorecard grades every carrier A through F on rate accuracy, billing quality, and timeliness, so anyone in ops or procurement can gauge carrier health at a glance Loop Intelligence allows your team to stop reconciling data and start making decisions on it. Finance closes on actuals. Procurement negotiates from fact. Operations catches problems before they compound. Want to learn more? Send us a DM!

Amazon Shipping is undercutting FedEx and UPS to win parcel volume. The savings are real, but so are the tradeoffs. It's not as simple as the headlines would suggest. Now open to all businesses, Amazon Shipping is pricing aggressively: fewer surcharges, lower fuel costs, simpler rates. We're seeing eligible residential volume move over at up to $6 less per package versus comparable FedEx and UPS services. For one retail client, Amazon could cover more than 90% of distribution at 33%+ annual savings beyond FedEx. But the headline rate is only half the picture. Amazon Shipping is ground-only, two to five days, contiguous US. If you ship express, overnight, or into markets it doesn't reach, it's one piece of your carrier mix, not a replacement. And a shorter surcharge sheet is not the same as a better contract. An alternative carrier deserves the same rigor you'd bring to a UPS or FedEx negotiation: volume commitments you can live with, rate protections, terms in writing. Know your shipping profile before you commit. That's where the leverage is. Supply Chain Dive spoke with our team Matt Sumowski, Paul Yaussy, and Adi Karamcheti for the piece. Link in the comments. #AmazonShipping #Parcel

Most F&B manufacturers would agree that inbound visibility is hard. The vendor picks the carrier. The freight is often prepaid and folded into the merchandise invoice, so the transportation cost never lands where you expect it to. The result is margins that look healthy in aggregate and come apart at the SKU level. You can't capitalize what you can't measure, and you can't fix what you can't see. This is a data problem. Once you can read the messy inbound and merchandise invoices, pull the line items, and hold vendors to your routing guides, inbound stops being the wild west and becomes a number you can actively manage. Just for fun, to all the F&B supply chain leaders, what % of your inbound spend has line-item visibility? #InboundTransportation #Visibility #FBMaufacturing

If you're heading to Parcel Forum, you don't want to miss Mike Bator's presentation on optimizing a diversified parcel network. Especially in today's parcel landscape, it's never been more important to diversify. You'll walk away with tangible steps on how to put yourself in the best position with your carriers going into 2027. Make sure to add it to your calendars!

Anyone else watch FedEx's Q4 earnings call? We certainly did, and we had some thoughts. Check out Paul's post below on what key takeaways shippers should be aware of when it comes your FedEx contract.

Switching carriers is the most disruptive way to cut parcel costs. It's also rarely necessary. A fast-growing DTC apparel brand hit a carrier renewal with a contract that hadn't been touched in two years. Volume had grown, lanes had shifted, package weights had changed... but the rates hadn't. They knew they were overpaying. They couldn't prove by how much. With Loop they got a complete view of their actual shipping profile mapped against current market rates. They walked into renewal knowing exactly what to ask for with the data to back it up. The result: $1.4M cut from parcel spend and a 9.3% blended rate reduction in eight weeks. Same carrier. Same service levels. The takeaway here isn't that their carrier was the problem. It's that they were negotiating without data, and the carrier wasn't. With peak season arriving quickly, having access to your data is paramount. Are you feeling ready? #ParcelShipping #CarrierContracts

We're heading to Parcel Forum this year! Paul Yaussy and Matt Sumowski are hosting a workshops on how to negotiate your 2027 carrier contracts. You won't want to miss that. Also Mike Bator is presenting best practices for optimizing a diversified parcel network using modern tech. So if you've been wondering how AI can help optimize your network, make sure to add Mike's presentation to your calendar. And come stop by booth 605 to meet the team and learn more about our logistics data platform. See you in Orlando!