Profits cut in half! When will the shipping industry see the light of day?

Volumes in its core shipping business fell 9.4 percent in the first three months of the year, and freight rates fell 37 percent, causing the division's revenue to fall by more than a third to .9 billion and operating profit to drop by nearly three-quarters to . One hundred million U.S. dollars.

Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc said in an interview that the first quarter will be the best quarter of the financial year, but there are still dark clouds ahead of us.

Operating profit more than halved in the first quarter due to slowing traffic and plummeting freight rates, forecasting weak results for the rest of 2023 and reiterating forecasts that global container traffic could shrink by 2.5% this year.

To avoid a deeper recession, Clerc said the shipping industry needs to rein in capacity and may have to idle more ships later this year. There are also some risks on the supply side, with new ships coming into service in the second half of this year and next year, which will bring new challenges to the industry.