Last year, Swiss-Italian shipping company MSC knocked Maersk off the throne as the world’s largest shipping company, and now the company is building out its lead over its Copenhagen-based peer.

The analysis house Linerlytica writes that the MSC fleet can now carry one million more containers than Maersk’s.

MSC has been busy spending the many billions of dollars that the shipping company earned during the pandemic on ordering new ships and vacuuming the second-hand market.

In 2023, the company has had 19 newbuildings delivered and purchased 31 second-hand ships with a total capacity of approx. 500,000 teu, Linerlytica writes.

The large container shipping companies have generally been busy ordering new vessels, which are continuously being delivered from the shipyards.

In June, box vessels with a total capacity of 277,873 teu entered the water, which according to Linerlytica is a new record for a single month.

MSC has Danish Søren Toft as CEO. He was previously chief operating officer at Maersk, but took over as CEO of MSC at the beginning of 2021.

The Geneva-based shipping company and Maersk have worked together since 2015 in the 2M alliance, sharing space on each other’s ships. However, the partnership has been terminated as of January 2025.

Several analysts have speculated that MSC’s expansion endeavors are due to the shipping company’s desire to be big enough to stand alone in the container freight market.

Maersk, on the other hand, has dropped its ambition to be the biggest and instead invested in land-based logistics and new ships that can run on alternative fuels such as green methanol.