321,500 TEU EXTRA

MSC has significantly strengthened its position as the world’s largest container shipping company in 2022, according to an overview by the French ship data collector Alphaliner. The Swiss-Italian shipping company added 321,500 teu (+7.5%) to its container fleet, considerably more than the competition.

In 2021, MSC had already grown like a cabbage: then the shipping company had even added 411,000 teu. The huge fleet does present the market leader with the enormous task of using all that capacity profitably in 2023 now that the market and container rates have become much less prosperous, but Alphaliner nevertheless calls MSC and the other large TEU collectors of 2022 the ‘gainers’ and the shipping companies that did not grow so fast, the ‘losers’.

The latter category includes Cosco, which saw its fleet shrink by 2.1%, and Maersk, which lost 1.4%. ONE and HMM also ended 2022 with less capacity than they started the year with, but their decline was less than 1%.

In percentage terms, the biggest grower of the year was ZIM: the Israeli shipping company expanded its fleet by 29%. The larger players CMA CGM (+7.1%) and Evergreen (+12.5%) are also counted among the winners of 2022 by Alphaliner. There was also growth, albeit more modestly, for Yang Ming and Hapag-Lloyd.