New | Maersk ends mega-ship building era with new acquisition plans

The owner of the world’s largest container shipping line will stop ordering newly built vessels and instead pursue takeovers in an industry that has been plagued by overcapacity for almost a decade.

A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, whose Maersk Line unit has repeatedly broken the world records it has regularly set in mega container ships developed with Asian ship yards, “is done with ordering new steel,” Michael Pram Rasmussen told Bloomberg at the the company’s Copenhagen headquarters.

“If Maersk Line needs to grow, it doesn’t make sense to order new ships as there are already too many ships in the market,” Rasmussen said. “So if we want to grow, we need to do it through acquisitions so that we don’t flood the market with more ships.”

Maersk Line still has 27 ships in its order book, corresponding to about 12 per cent of its current fleet. The container industry’s combined order book represents about 17 per cent of the global fleet.

Meanwhile, the shipping industry is suffering from falling freight rates caused by a combination of overcapacity and a slowdown in global trade growth.