Shipping’s biggest has gotten a whole lot bigger. Mediterranean Shipping Company has reportedly become the first container shipping line to reach 900 vessels.
Media reports indicate that MSC’s current fleet is around 609 owned vessels and about 291 chartered ships, across its various entities, including Medlog and others. This is backed up by Alphaliner data, which shows that MSC has (as at 24 April 2025) 903 ships in its fleet, of which 614 are owned, 289 are chartered, and 128 are on order.
Alphaliner data shows that the world’s box capable fleet is about 7,297 active ships, of which just over 6,500 are fully cellular (i.e. are dedicated box ships).
The box carrying capacity of the total world fleet is 32.17 million TEU, and, for the fully cellular fleet, is 31.76 million.
The weekly capacity of the trans-Pacific trade is about 546,735 TEU, Alphaliner adds.
MSC is the biggest operator by far with vessels that have just under 6.52 million TEU capacity, which means it has a share of the total capacity of about 20.4%. MSC’s headline capacity figure is only going to get bigger in both absolute and relative terms as it has biggest TEU capacity by far (Maersk, formerly the largest carrier by capacity and now the world number 2 by capacity, has a carrying capacity of 4.58m TEU, about a 14.3% share), and it also has the largest orderbook.
CMA CGM is interesting as it currently has a TEU capacity of about 3.9m TEU and a 12.2% share, however, it (currently) has a bigger orderbook than Maersk (which has an orderbook of about 51 vessels with just under 713k TEU of capacity) and, unless the big Danish company orders radically more tonnage or CMA cancels a slew of orders (or hands back a lot of chartered tonnage), then Marseille-based company looks set to overtake Maersk as the third largest box carrier by TEU capacity. CMA has 99 vessels on order with a total capacity of just under 1.5m TEU on order.
