UPS was the delivery company whose 1999 IPO was the first to raise more than $5 billion.
United Parcel Service had operated privately for more than nine decades before selling shares to the public. On November 10, 1999, it offered 109.4 million Class B shares at $50 each and raised about $5.47 billion. That made the offering the largest U.S. IPO at the time, surpassing oil company Conoco’s 1998 offering.
The timing mattered. The late-1990s IPO boom was dominated by internet and technology companies, yet UPS attracted investors as an established logistics business positioned to benefit from rapidly growing e-commerce. Its brown trucks and delivery network were suddenly central to the online-shopping economy’s physical infrastructure.
The IPO represented only a portion of the company’s ownership. UPS remained strongly connected to its employees and managers, and much of the money raised was used to fund a tender offer for existing Class A shares. USPS is a government postal service, not a publicly traded corporation, while DHL and FedEx did not make this particular record-setting 1999 offering.