The story
At the beginning of the 1920s, A.P. Møller considered possibilities of going into liner trade business. The tramp trade, where vessels sailed from port to port depending on the demand, was expected to lose ground to liners in time. On 12 July 1928, the vessel Leise Mærsk left Baltimore on its first voyage from the American East Coast via the Panama Canal to the Far East and back. The cargo consisted of Ford car parts and other general cargo. This heralded the start of Maersk's shipping services. Maersk Line began to grow in 1946 after the Second World War by transporting goods between America and Europe before expanding services in 1950. On 26 April 1956, ocean-borne container transport was introduced with the shipment of a SeaLand container aboard the SS Ideal X from Port Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas. In 1967, British carrier P&O was part of the first European initiative, a pooling of liner services from four companies, into the new company Overseas Containers Limited (OCL). Both Sea-land and P&O would later be taken over by Maersk Line as it expanded operations between 1999 and 2005.
In 1999, Maersk entered into an agreement on acquisition of Safmarine Container Lines (SCL) and its related liner activities from South African Marine Corporation Limited (Safmarine). At the time of acquisition, Safmarine Container Lines operated approximately 50 liner vessels and a fleet of about 80,000 containers. It covered a total of ten trades and fully complemented Maersk Line's existing network. Safmarine Container Lines joined the A.P. Moller – Maersk Group as an independent unit with its own liner activities.
On 10 December 1999, the A.P. Moller Group acquired the international container business of SeaLand Service Inc. The business was integrated with the A.P. Moller Group companies and as part of the integration, Maersk Line changed its name to Maersk Sealand. The acquisition comprised 70 vessels, almost 200,000 containers as well as terminals, offices and agencies around the world.
In May 2005 Maersk announced plans to purchase P&O Nedlloyd for 2.3 billion euros. At the time of the acquisition, P&O Nedlloyd had 6% of the global industry market share, and Maersk-Sealand had 12%. The combined company would be about 18% of world market share. Maersk completed the buyout of the company on 13 August 2005, Royal P&O Nedlloyd shares terminated trading on 5 September. In February 2006, the new combined entity adopted the name Maersk Line.
At the time the company was folded into A.P. Moller, it owned and chartered a fleet of over 160 vessels. Its container fleet, consisting of owned and leased vessels, had a capacity of 635,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). Royal P&O Nedlloyd N.V. had 13,000 employees in 146 countries.
By the end of 2006, Maersk global market share had fallen from 18.2% to 16.8%, at the same time, the next two largest carriers increased their market share, Mediterranean Shipping Company went from 8.6% to 9.5% and CMA CGM from 5.6% to 6.5%. In January 2008, Maersk Line announced drastic reorganisational measures.
In November 2015, after lower than expected results, Maersk Line announced its decision to lay off 4000 employees by 2017. The group said it would cut its annual administration costs by $250 million over the next two years and would cancel 35 scheduled voyages in the fourth quarter of 2015 on top of four regularly scheduled sailings it canceled earlier in the year.
As of October 2015, Maersk Line along with its subsidiaries such as Seago, MCC, Safmarine and SeaLand, control a combined 18% share of the total container shipping market.
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Since 1 December 2017, Hamburg Süd had been part of the company. In 2023, it was announced that Hamburg Süd would be unified with the Maersk brand.
In March 2021, Maersk announced that is aiming to have the world's first carbon neutral vessel launched in 2023, seven years ahead of its original schedule. In August of that year, the company purchased eight methanol powered shipping vessels for $1.4 billion from Hyundai Heavy Industries.
In 2012, Maersk Line paid $31.9 million in fines to the U.S. following a Department of Justice investigation contending that Maersk had "knowingly overcharged the Department of Defense to transport thousands of containers from ports to inland delivery destinations in Iraq and Afghanistan" while under government contract to transport cargo via container ships in support of U.S. troops.
The Red Sea crisis has had a significant impact on shipping, from November 2023 onward; in May 2024, Maersk estimated the impact as a capacity loss of 15–20 percent across the merchant shipping industry, based on its FY second quarter. Maersk also announced that its ships were rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid further attacks.
From Wikipedia’s article on Maersk Line, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5