Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC) has reached another extraordinary fleet milestone, taking its tally of secondhand containership acquisitions since August 2020 to 500 ships, according to Alphaliner.
The landmark comes with the Swiss carrier’s acquisition of the 2,796 teu Calandra for a reported $27m and the 1,732 teu Fitz Roy for more than $26m.
In its latest weekly report, Alphaliner described MSC’s buying campaign as unique in container shipping history and unlikely ever to be matched by another carrier.
When Gianluigi Aponte’s company began raiding the secondhand market in August 2020, MSC operated around 3.8m teu. Today its fleet is approaching 7.4m teu, giving it more than 21% of global liner capacity.
The secondhand campaign initially allowed MSC to replace chartered tonnage with owned ships, but rapidly became one leg of an unprecedented expansion strategy.
Newbuildings have been equally important. MSC took only 15 months to grow from 6m to 7m teu, with 68 newbuild deliveries accounting for around 799,000 teu of that million-teu increase. The carrier still has more than 2m teu of additional capacity on order and has continued to be linked with further large LNG dual-fuel newbuilding programmes.
The scale has transformed the structure of global liner shipping.
MSC overtook Maersk to become the world’s largest containerline at the start of 2022, when the two companies each controlled just over 4.2m teu. It has subsequently opened a gap of several million teu over its Danish rival.
More importantly, sheer fleet size has allowed MSC to do something none of its major competitors has attempted: operate the principal east-west trades without belonging to a global vessel-sharing alliance.
Following the end of the 2M partnership with Maersk in February 2025, MSC launched its own standalone network. It retains selective slot-exchange arrangements, including with Premier Alliance carriers, but no longer relies on an alliance partner to provide the ships needed to offer a global network.
