APM-Maersk - number of ships 2024

APM-Maersk owned 336 ships and was chartering 343 ships as of the end of January 2024. Overall, the Copenhagen-headquartered shipper accounted for 14.6 percent of the world’s merchant container fleet.

Fleet capacity

APM-Maersk has ships with a capacity of more than four million twenty-foot-equivalent units, which could be broken down to roughly 2.5 million twenty-foot-equivalent units of owned capacity and about 1.6 million twenty-foot equivalent units of chartered capacity. Furthermore, the container line had ships with some additional 367,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units of capacity in its order book.

One of Maersk’s most impressive container ship is the Madrid Mærsk. The Triple-E vessel was built by South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Company, one of the largest shipbuilding companies worldwide. The megahauler is just under 400 meters long and 59 meters wide, trailing only the OOCL Hong Kong in TEU capacity. Triple-E stands for "economies of scale", "energy efficient" and "environmentally improved". The ships in the Triple-E class are regarded as the most efficient container ships per twenty-foot equivalent of cargo. However, the building of such mega ships comes at a risk as the container shipping-industry continues to suffer from overcapacity and weak global demand in times of rising trade tensions.

About Maersk

In terms of twenty-foot-equivalent units, Denmark’s Maersk Lines is the world’s largest container-shipping company. Twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) are the shipping industry’s standard unit of measure, denoting the capacity of a standard freight container.