According to Alphaliner’s latest capacity data, as of November 24, 2020, the world’s top twenty container shipping companies are ranked as follows in terms of capacity. The rankings are as follows: Maersk (1st) and Mediterranean Shipping (2nd) , COSCO SHIPPING Lines (No. 3), CMA CGM (No. 4), Hapag-Lloyd (No. 5), ONE (No. 6), Evergreen Shipping (No. 7), Hyundai Merchant Shipping (No. 8), Yangming Shipping (No. 9), Star Shipping (No. 10). The world’s top ten liner companies account for 83.6% of the world’s top 100 container liner companies.

The eleventh to twentieth are Wan Hai Shipping, Taiping Shipping, China Grain Stream, Korea Shipping, Iran Air, Antong Holdings, Singapore X-press, SITC International, Unifeeder, and Changjin Merchant Shipping.

TOP 20 ship container TEU

For the past 25 years, Maersk has been the world’s largest container liner company, firmly sitting on the top spot, and MSC, which has been following closely behind, is expected to surpass Maersk to take the top spot.

In recent weeks, MSC has been very active in the second-hand ship market. According to foreign media reports, MSC continues to actively increase its fleet, and this week the company conducted two other ship transactions. It is worth mentioning that this is the 11th ship purchased by the company in a short period of time.

Analysts from Copenhagen-based sea intelligence pointed out in a report released on Sunday that MSC may soon replace Maersk as the world’s largest shipping company.

Hyundai Merchant Marine stated in its third-quarter results that revenue for the period was US$1.43 billion, an increase of 18.7% year-on-year. The cargo volume was 1.04 million TEU, slightly lower than the 1.07 million TEU in the same period last year. A single quarter profit of US$20.5m, a loss of US$103m in the same period last year, performance improved significantly. It is understood that HMM returned to profitability in the second quarter of this year, ending 21 quarters of losses and achieving a net profit of US$23.7m.

Taiping Shipping, which is deeply mired in debt, announced its unaudited performance data for the first half of 2020 on November 18. In the first half of 2020, it achieved operating income of US$1.026bn, net loss of US$120m, and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of US$102m.

Among China’s shipping companies, China Grain Stream ranks 13th and Antong ranks 16th. On September 25, China’s container logistics company Shanghai China Grain Logistics Co., Ltd. was listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It is planned to publicly raise 1.479 billion yuan(US$225m), which will be invested in container ship purchase projects and container purchase projects, including 6 1900TEU container ships and 82,000TEU containers.