Maersk doesn’t believe any of the ocean freight carriers outside of itself and Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) have the ability to stand alone. For this reason, the company doesn’t believe there will be a shakeup of the Ocean and THE alliances in the wake of 2M’s split.

Greg Knowler quoted Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc in a Journal of Commerce article:

“’The situation 2M was in was unique…it was an alliance of the two largest carriers and both of us had reached a size where we could stand alone if we wanted to,’ Clerc told analysts on the carrier’s 2022 earnings call Wednesday.

“’I don’t think any of the other carriers today have the comprehensiveness of coverage that is required to be competitive, or the cost base to say, ‘I could stand alone,’’ he added.”

That Maersk CEO quote is very interesting. There are some other extremely large ocean freight carriers out there. Rounding out the top five right behind MSC and Maersk are CMA CGM, COSCO, and Hapag-Lloyd. None of those giant shipping lines could stand on its own?

Using slightly old data (from June of 2021) Visual Capitalist has ocean freight carriers ranked by size, listing their capacity by TEU and number of ships. At that point, CMA CGM had capacity of 3.2M TEU with 542 ships, COSCO had 497 ships with a capacity of 2.9M TEU, and Hapag-Lloyd had 1.7M TEU of capacity with its 259 ships. Even when you go to numbers 6 and 7 on the list, Ocean Network Express (ONE) – formed by the merging of Japan’s three largest shipping lines – and Evergreen, each had 1.5M TEU of capacity and over 200 ships.

All of these ocean freight carriers made billions over the last couple years and have been able to increase their size….

Find out more by reading the full post in Universal Cargo’s blog.