According to Sea-Intelligence, the profitability of major shipping lines in 2024 has significantly decreased compared to the peak years of 2021 and 2022, but remains notably higher than pre-pandemic levels.
The major shipping lines (that report on – and have so far published – their financial figures), have recorded a combined 2024-FY EBIT of USD 27.3bn. In comparison, the combined EBIT for 2021 and 2022 was nearly USD 200bn, across the same set of shipping lines. That said, the 2024 level of profitability is still significantly higher than the pre-Covid years. In fact, the EBIT recorded in 2024-FY is higher than the combined EBIT of 2019, 2020, and 2023.
Given that the shipping lines covered do not make up the entirety of the market – notable absentees include MSC (privately held), PIL (rarely publish financial accounts), CMA CGM (no longer publicly publish EBIT) – the total market profitability is estimated by extending the average profitability of the lines who have indeed disclosed their earnings, to the market as a whole, based on operated capacity.
Clearly this is an approximation, but using this approach implies total industry profitability at the EBIT level of USD 60 billion in 2024, Sea-Intelligence notes.
The figure above shows the /TEU of the shipping lines that report on both their EBIT and global volumes on an annual basis. Although Maersk’s 192 /TEU is significantly lower than in 2021-2022, it is still higher than most of the pre-pandemic years, whereas for ZIM (674 /TEU), HMM (622 /TEU), Hapag-Lloyd (215 /TEU), and OOCL (346 /TEU), it is the highest in the last decade outside of 2021-2022. For ONE line (300 /TEU).
