(FORTUNE Magazine) – HOURS AFTER MONSTER TSUNAMIS POUNDED SEASIDE communities around Asia on Dec. 26, executives at FedEx sprang into action. Members of the company's global community relations team worked the phones, coordinating with international charities and matching their donations of food, clothing, and medicine with transportation. Route planners revamped FedEx delivery schedules, redeploying planes and pilots to move 230 tons of medical supplies to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. By Dec. 30, as President Bush struggled to blunt criticism that the official U.S. relief effort was too slow and too stingy, FedEx vice president Jack Muhs was plotting the logistics of getting 344,000 pounds of Pedialyte, an oral rehydration solution for infants and children made by a division of Abbott, to Sri Lanka's Colombo airport. To ensure swift delivery, he chartered a plane at FedEx's expense. The effort "was a little extraordinary," Muhs says.

FedEx is just one of the many American corporations to leap into action in the tsunami aftermath. Pfizer, whose CEO, Hank McKinnell, spent 30 years working in Asia, pledged $35 million in cash and medicine. Other blue-chip corporate donors included Coca-Cola ($10 million), Dow Chemical ($5 million), Exxon Mobil ($5 million), Merck ($3 million), Citigroup ($3 million), Wal-Mart ($2 million), and Microsoft ($2 million). At the Red Cross alone, officials said that between Dec. 26 and Jan. 4, they raised $103 million--more than half of it from corporate donors. In addition, companies like Apple, Amazon, and others helped raise millions by posting calls for donations on their websites.

During a trip to the region in early January, Colin Powell acknowledged that U.S. aid "does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world ... an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action." Indeed, the multinational tragedy gave the beaten-up U.S. corporate sector a welcome opportunity to show the good that it can do.

Company efforts went far beyond just writing checks. "Companies can really make a significant contribution where they have unique competencies," says Robert Davies, CEO of the International Business Leaders Forum, a nonprofit group in Britain whose 80 members include some of the world's largest global firms. "Logistics, antibiotics, telecom, distribution--these are areas where companies are much more competent than governments." Microsoft contributed servers and manpower to help relief organizations cope with the surge in contributions. Cisco supplied "NetRelief" kits--metal boxes fitted out with Internet phones and an easy-to-operate router--providing relief workers and survivors with a compact, low-cost way to connect to the Internet via satellite. DHL offered the United Nations use of its warehouses in Jakarta. Coke and Pepsi offered bottling facilities and distribution networks. In Thailand, Coke pledged to deliver 500,000 bottles of water in the days after the waves hit; one bottler shifted operation of all its facilities to producing water for survivors. Fearing donations might be seen as public relations gimmicks, some firms didn't announce--or even comment on--contributions.

Just two weeks after the disaster, the Contributions Academy, a group that tracks corporate giving, estimates that corporate contributions for tsunami relief totaled $178 million from 114 companies. That's on pace to top the previous record, the $682 million that the Giving USA Foundation, which analyzes charitible contributions, estimates firms eventually gave to 9/11 victims.

Curt Weeden, president of the Contributions Academy, says that over 90% of the donations his organization tracks were from U.S. companies, though foreign entities such as Airbus, Nestlé, and Germany's ThyssenKrupp also made significant gestures. In Japan--a nation that has extensive manufacturing operations in the afflicted countries and the world's second-largest economy--Toyota pledged $3 million to the Japanese Red Cross, but contributions by other Japanese industrial giants fell well short of the million-dollar mark. That may reflect cultural differences; aid officials say Japanese executives tend to view disaster relief as best left to governments and international institutions and not the business of business. It's a distinction that will be lost on tsunami survivors. -- With Nadira A. Hira