World’s biggest container shipping lines MSC and Maersk end alliance

The world’s two largest container lines are ending an eight-year vessel-sharing agreement as the fierce shipping rivalry over transporting goods hots up.

MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company and Maersk, the number one and two in the container shipping industry by volumes, said on Wednesday that they had agreed not to renew their alliance in 2025.

When it was signed in 2015, the agreement allowed the companies to better manage cargo volumes at a time when the industry faced years of losses and excess shipping capacity.

But the pact, known as the 2M alliance, has been terminated as both groups jostle for pole position in the container shipping sector.

MSC, whose chief executive Soren Toft was poached from Maersk in 2020, became the industry leader last year after half a century in its rival’s wake.

Both groups have cashed in on soaring freight rates during the Covid-19 pandemic and have been investing in diverging strategies.

While MSC has piled money into enlarging its shipping fleet, Maersk has focused on expanding across the supply chain and making several billion-dollar acquisitions to bulk up its land-based logistics business.

“Discontinuing the 2M alliance paves the way for both companies to continue to pursue their individual strategies,” said the Swiss and Danish companies’ chief executives in a joint statement, adding that they “look forward to a continued strong collaboration throughout the remainder of the agreement period”.

Maersk and MSC together control two-fifths of all seaborne freight, giving the 2M alliance the ability to offer customers more frequent departures than a single shipping line would do.

But under Toft, a former senior manager at Maersk, the secretive and private MSC has grown so quickly that analysts suggested in recent months that it had outgrown the alliance.

Johan Sigsgaard, head of ocean products at Maersk, also told the Financial Times that the group has “the fleet size we need, the vessel size to remain competitive”.

Although the frequency of departures will be affected, he said Maersk preferred to have the “agility” to plan its own journeys to meet customers’ needs for a flexible supply chain.

He said the move had nothing to do with recent regulatory scrutiny of the container shipping industry, after surging demand for goods and supply chain bottlenecks drove an extraordinary rise in freight rates from the summer of 2020 until the end of last year.

Following this period of bumper profits, the container shipping industry now faces leaner times.

As demand for shipments drops amid a gloomy economic outlook, some analysts have warned that the sector faces a significant oversupply of ships — something that vessel-sharing arrangements have previously helped shipping groups to manage.

With the break-up of the 2M alliance, the industry was in effect “going from three major players to four”, said Alex Irving, a logistics industry analyst at Bernstein.

“Is that going to make it harder to find capacity discipline? Potentially. Is that going to put further pressure on ocean rates? It’s more likely that happens,” he said.

Maersk said it still had up to 50 smaller partnerships in different parts of the world and believed that a “more controlled backbone network” made greater sense currently.

“We continue to strengthen and modernise our fleet, providing us with the scale we need for the most comprehensive ocean and short-sea shipping network in the market,” said Toft. “We remain focused on delivering high-quality, personal service to a wide range of clients.”