Container shipping concentration — Drewry data and Lars Jensen's reading

Container shipping is the unglamorous plumbing of global trade. Roughly 80% of internationally traded goods by volume move on containerised vessels. Drewry Maritime Research and the Copenhagen-based Vespucci Maritime, founded by long-time shipping analyst Lars Jensen, are the two reference sources for tracking the industry's market structure.

From the late 2010s through 2024, east-west liner shipping was organised around three alliances: 2M (Maersk and MSC), Ocean Alliance (CMA CGM, COSCO, Evergreen, OOCL), and THE Alliance (Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, Yang Ming, HMM). The alliances pooled vessel capacity to maintain weekly sailings on major lanes, sharing slots without merging operations. By 2024 the three alliances controlled over 80% of Asia-Europe and trans-Pacific capacity.

In 2023 MSC announced it would exit the 2M alliance in January 2025, having become the largest container shipping line in the world and judging it no longer needed Maersk's capacity to maintain its service network. Maersk subsequently announced the Gemini Cooperation with Hapag-Lloyd, restructuring the alliance map. Lars Jensen's analysis of the new structure emphasises that the headline 'less concentration' read is misleading: the alliances are less dominant, but the underlying carriers are more dominant individually, with MSC alone controlling roughly 20% of global container capacity.

The Drewry data on freight rates shows the alliance reshuffle has so far not produced sustained rate competition. Spot rates on Asia-Europe routes remain elevated relative to pre-2020 baselines, in part because of Red Sea rerouting via the Cape, in part because effective competition among three or four global carriers is structurally limited.

The policy question — whether liner shipping's competition law exemptions, granted in the EU as the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation and in the US as the Shipping Act's antitrust immunity, are still justified — is being relitigated in Brussels in 2026. The CBER expired in April 2024; the Commission has so far declined to renew it.

­The Drewry Maritime Research dataset is the longest-running commercial source on container-shipping concentration metrics. Drewry's tracking of the top-three (2M alliance, Ocean Alliance, THE Alliance) and top-eight (the addition of the major standalones — Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, Evergreen, Yang Ming, HMM) carrier shares, broken out by deepsea trade lane, has been the benchmark concentration measure used by competition authorities for over fifteen years.

The headline 2024-2025 picture is the dissolution of the 2M alliance between Maersk and MSC, formally effective January 2025, and the formation of the Gemini cooperation between Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, alongside MSC's pivot to standalone operation on most major trades. The previous three-alliance structure that had been stable from 2017 onward has therefore fragmented into a more complex arrangement: Gemini covers the high-quality side of the Asia-Europe and trans-Pacific lanes, MSC operates standalone with its enlarged owned fleet, the remaining alliance pairings continue covering the trades that their members have shared capacity on for a decade.

Lars Jensen at Vespucci Maritime — whose daily commentary is the most widely read independent reading of the container market — has emphasised that the headline alliance restructuring is less analytically interesting than the underlying capacity expansion. MSC has roughly doubled its owned fleet through aggressive second-hand purchases and newbuild contracting since 2020, making it the world's largest container line by carrying capacity. Maersk has held capacity flat in absolute terms while shifting its portfolio toward logistics integration (terminals, warehousing, last-mile delivery) as the company's strategic emphasis has rotated away from pure deepsea carriage. CMA CGM has expanded both owned fleet and logistics footprint, the latter through the Bolloré Logistics acquisition completed in 2022.

The supply-and-demand balance is what determines container freight rates and therefore the carriers' profit cycle. The post-pandemic 2020-2022 super-cycle produced unprecedented carrier profitability ($350-400 billion across the industry in 2022 alone, by Drewry's estimates) that funded the newbuild orderbook now delivering through 2025-2027. The delivered capacity will, absent demand growth that currently is not forecast, produce structural overcapacity on most major trade lanes and pressure rates back toward operating-cost levels. The Houthi-Red Sea diversion of Asia-Europe transits via the Cape of Good Hope is the current major absorber of that surplus capacity, which is why the diversion's eventual resolution is the most-watched downside variable in the carrier-equity research community.

The competition-policy dimension is the part that has come under renewed attention as the consortia have restructured. The European Commission's Consortia Block Exemption Regulation, which had specifically exempted container-line vessel-sharing agreements from general competition rules, lapsed in April 2024 and was not renewed. The change subjects future alliance arrangements to standard EU competition assessment. The US Federal Maritime Commission and the Department of Justice have continued investigating specific complaints around port-call and demurrage charges rather than the broader alliance structure. Whether the regulatory environment of 2025 produces a more competitive carrier industry than the 2010s did is the open empirical question; the structural answer depends more on the demand-side cycle and the newbuild delivery profile than on the formal alliance configurations.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.