Maersk, ONE and MSC lost their market share and were taken away by other top ten shipping companies

A shipping consulting company analyzed that the market share of Maersk, ONE and MSC is losing to other top ten container shipping companies.

Sea-Intelligence's analysis shows that in the past four years, competition among the world's top ten container shipping companies has intensified. Maersk and ONE have been robbed of some market shares by several other large shipping companies.

This analysis company studied the changes in the market share of the top ten shipping companies from April 2017 to April 2021. According to its data, since April 2017, compared with other top ten shipping companies, only China's COSCO, Germany's Hapag-Lloyd and South Korea's HMM have increased their market share.

The picture compared with April 2017, the top 10 market share changes

The data shows that compared with other competitors, Maersk and ONE have changed the most and have lost several percentage points.

"Such development will show that the degree of consolidation of the top 10 shipping companies will slightly decline, because growth is not limited to the largest operators in the industry," Sea-Intelligence wrote, while also studying Herfindahl- The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which measures the degree of market integration-from complete dispersion (low value) to monopoly (high value).

The index shows that in more than 40 years, the largest shipping companies from 1980 to 1998 were relatively close in size. However, from 1999 to 2006, there was a wave of consolidation, including the construction of large new ship projects.

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From 2006 to 2017, HHI competition was more or less stable, but since 2017, the index has shown a downward trend with less integration, including in 2021, "HHI is now lower than at any time since 2006 ", Sea-Intelligence wrote.

Since the outbreak of the new crown virus at the beginning of last year, the container market has been picking up, with increasing demand, rising freight rates and huge profits for carriers. As a result, authorities including the US Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) have now strengthened their monitoring of the market and large shipping alliances.

The top ten shipping companies are part of three major competitive alliances currently being monitored by the US FMC authorities: 2M alliance includes Maersk and MSC; The Alliance includes Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, Yangming and HMM; Ocean Alliance includes CMA CGM , COSCO Container Lines (OOCL) and Evergreen Shipping.

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