Gianluigi Aponte-founded Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC) has become the first liner to command a 20% global market share since Maersk momentarily hit such heights for a few months in early 2018. MSC is also just one megamax delivery away from becoming the first carrier in the world to operate a fleet in excess of 6m teu.
While MSC has created enough critical mass to operate alone from next year, Maersk has reached out to Hapag-Lloyd to form the Gemini Cooperation, which will officially launch in February 2025.
Analysts at Alphaliner forecast that MSC’s market share will be equal to Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd’s combined come the launch of the Gemini Cooperation early next year.
From the company’s launch in 1970, it took MSC some 37 years to reach a fleet capacity of 1m teu. Only four and a half years later, MSC then passed the 2m teu mark. By early 2022 it had surpassed Maersk as the world’s largest carrier on the back of record newbuild orders and hundreds of secondhand purchases in the 2020s.
At the end of April, Danish consultancy Sea-Intelligence projected what the top 10 liner rankings will look like in April 2026, taking many aspects into account, including orderbooks, the carriers’ typical approach related to redelivery of charter vessels and the sale of secondhand tonnage.
“MSC will grow their size advantage substantially compared to the second largest carrier – which incidentally will be CMA CGM, relegating Maersk to be the world’s third largest carrier,” Sea-Intelligence stated.
By April 2026, MSC is projected to have a fleet with more than 7m slots.
MSC, which is also a big name in the cruise sector, has diversified a great deal in recent years on the back of record profits investing in airplanes, logistics companies, newspapers, towage and car carriers.
Can we safely extrapolate from this that three carriers control 40% of the global liner trade volumes and that four European carriers have more than 50% of the trades?
That seems to buck the global manufacturing trend of Chinese dominance (especially in shipbuilding and container production).
It would be interesting to see what Mr Trump would make of all that if he realised that the USA is almost entirely dependent upon foreign transport companies for exports and imports?
With such an expansion of traffic and such lagardly infrastructure, will the US be able to cope at ports and other major transport interchanges with such volumes and potential chokepoints in the future?