Hapag-Lloyd does it with Maersk
Freighter giants form an alliance
January 17, 2024, 1:10 p.m
Hundreds of ships and millions of containers: two of the largest container shipping companies want to join forces. Through the cooperation, the companies want to guarantee greater reliability. However, an alliance of this magnitude is not positive news for ports.
Germany’s largest container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd and the Danish shipping company Maersk want to join forces in freight transport and are planning a long-term cooperation from February next year. The companies want to create a fleet pool of around 290 ships with a combined capacity of 3.4 million standard containers (TEU), as both sides announced.
The world’s second largest container shipping company Maersk wants to have a 60 percent share, with the rest coming from Hapag-Lloyd. Through the cooperation, the companies want to achieve a schedule reliability of over 90 percent. As a result of the agreement, Hapag-Lloyd wants to leave the shipping alliance “THE Alliance” at the end of January 2025. The Hamburg company joined forces with other shipping companies to form this alliance in 2017.
Maersk, in turn, was in the “2M alliance” with the global market leader MSC – however, the two companies had already announced a year ago that they would go their separate ways in the future and that this alliance would end after ten years in January 2025. Hapag-Lloyd boss Rolf Habben Jansen said in March last year that he did not expect the end of 2M to have a massive impact on other alliances and that his company’s membership in “THE Alliance” would run until 2030.
Maersk and MSC entered into an alliance to coordinate routes and the occupancy of their ships. The EU tolerated such alliances during the shipping crisis in the middle of the last decade because the shipping companies remained operationally independent and it assumed that they would not restrict competition.
For the ports, however, such mergers meant that the shipping companies had greater influence on where the goods went. This allowed the shipping companies to influence the prices of the terminals. A total of three alliances were founded at that time: In addition to 2M and “THE Alliance” also the “Ocean Alliance” with CMA, Cosco and others. The shipping companies had previously engaged in a ruinous price war that led to several takeovers.