The figures are eye-watering.
Latest research by maritime consultancy Sea-Intelligence reveals that global shipping lines made an operating profit of over US$110 billion in 2021. HMM and OOCL results had not yet been published at time of writing, (OOCL has since published its results which reveal record figures), and are likely to add US$10-15bn to the tally.
“To put this into perspective,” says Sea-Intelligence CEO Alan Murphy, the combined 2010-2020 operating profit across all years was a combined figure of US$37.54bn. In short, the industry has tripled its operating profit in 2021-FY compared to the past decade. And this is discounting MSC (privately held) and PIL (irregular updates).”
Figure 1 shows the Ebit/TEU for the 2010-2021 period of shipping lines that report on both their Ebit and global volumes.
The table shows what Murphy describes as the “absurd nature” of the supply/demand situation and the freight rate environment of 2021, dwarfing each of the previous years in terms of Ebit/TEU.
“The previous years are hardly relevant in the context of the outsized Ebit/TEU numbers that we are seeing right now. In 2021-FY, the smallest Ebit/TEU was recorded by Maersk of US$686/TEU, whereas the largest was recorded by ZIM of a staggering US$1 671/TEU.
“On average, these six shipping lines netted an operating profit of US$861/TEU. Putting it into perspective, in the entire last decade, the highest average Ebit/TEU of these global shipping lines was US$155/TEU - and that was back in 2010.”
