shipping
Maersk ends 2021 with record Danish profit
The tense supply chains with far too little transport capacity have brought the Danish shipping company Maersk 2021 a big profit. Photo: Gioia Forster/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Corona has shaken up international container shipping. This causes transport prices to rise, much to the advantage of shipping companies such as Danish industry giant Maersk.
The tense supply chains with transport capacities that are far too tight have brought the Danish shipping company Maersk a profit of 18 billion US dollars in 2021.
That is more than six times as much as in the already profitable first Corona year 2020. Maersk, together with MSC by far the industry leader among the large container shipping companies, also set a Danish record: According to the local news agency Ritzau, there has never been a Danish one before The company made as much money in one year as Maersk did in 2021. The shipping company’s turnover jumped to 61.8 billion dollars thanks to the enormous increase in prices for container transport, as AP Møller – Mærsk A/S announced on Wednesday in Copenhagen. Compared to 2020, this is an increase of around 55 percent.
Complex logistics company
Meanwhile, Maersk is continuing the expansion of the shipping business into a complex logistics company, which has been going on for some time: the Danes are taking over Pilot Freight Services for almost 1.7 billion US dollars. The US company offers logistics, especially for large, unwieldy goods, from the so-called first to the last mile, i.e. from ordering the goods to delivery. Maersk only announced the takeover of the German flight logistics company Senator International in November.
The main fuel for the profit explosion in 2021 are the enormously increased prices – in industry jargon freight rates – for transport by sea, which are causing the profits of all container shipping companies to go through the roof this year. This also applies, for example, to the largest German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd, which will present its final figures for 2021 in March. The traditional German shipping company Hamburg Süd also belongs to the Maersk Group.
Increased demand for sea transport
The corona pandemic has thrown the schedules of the liner shipping companies upside down in such a way that ships and containers are often not where they should be – to the chagrin of consumers and companies, some of whom have had to wait a very long time for ordered goods for months. In addition, the economic recovery, especially in China and the USA, which picked up earlier and stronger than in Germany, has increased the demand for sea transport to such an extent that capacities are more than exhausted.
The industry is currently expecting normalization in the second half of 2022, including Maersk. In the most important segment, sea transport (Ocean), the shipping company is only expecting growth of two to four percent for 2022, while segment sales increased by 65 percent last year. This means that the profit (before taxes and interest, EBIT) will not be quite as high as in the previous year.