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Maersk is the world's biggest container shipping company, moving goods across the oceans in giant metal boxes.
Maersk is the biggest container shipping company on Earth. If you buy something made in Asia and it shows up in Europe or America a few weeks later, there is a decent chance it spent that time on one of Maersk's ships — those huge vessels stacked with thousands of steel boxes, each one holding someone's sneakers, furniture, or car parts. The company moves those boxes across the oceans and also runs the ports, warehouses, and trucks that get them from the ship's deck to the store.
Shipping is a brutally cyclical business. Maersk's ships are lumpy, expensive, and last for decades, and when freight rates are high, everyone orders more ships — which then flood the market and crash the rates. Maersk has responded by building an "end-to-end" logistics arm, so it can sell customers the whole journey rather than just the water leg. A big part of that came from absorbing the logistics business of Damco and swallowing the German freight forwarder Senator International, plus running port terminals through its APM Terminals arm. The other half of the story is energy. Maersk also owns a large stake in APM Terminals and previously ran Maersk Oil, which it sold to TotalEnergies in 2017. Today Maersk is pushing hard to make its fleet greener, ordering ships that can run on methanol and other cleaner fuels — a bet that big customers like Amazon and Walmart will pay up for lower-carbon shipping.
The business spits out enormous amounts of cash in good years and painful losses in bad ones; in 2022, freight rates spiked during supply-chain chaos and Maersk earned more profit in a single year than it had in the previous decade combined. It pays that money back to shareholders and keeps buying back shares. The basic problem it solves is simple and physical: someone in one country made something, and someone in another country wants it, and the ocean is the cheap highway in between.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026