MSC and Maersk recently announced that they would end their alliance in January 2025. In addition, the Ocean Alliance’s contract is scheduled to end in 2027. The current global market share of the MSC and Maersk alliance is 40 percent and that of the Ocean Alliance is 35 percent.

Each of Maersk and MSC is planning to go alone after the end of their partnership. In this regard, MSC has ordered 1.73 million TEU of container carriers in order to increase its transport capacity to 6.33 million TEU. Maersk is expanding its ground, maritime and air transport at the same time.

With a sea change on the horizon in the industry, HMM is planning to respond to it by having more ships. Its current capacity is 0.81 million TEU, eighth-largest in the industry, and it is planning to exceed one million TEU in 2024.

Under the circumstances, attention is focusing on the privatization of the largest shipping company in South Korea. Korea Development Bank and Korea Ocean Business Corporation are currently conducting preliminary feasibility studies to that end. At present, they are the largest (20.7 percent) and second-largest (19.6 percent) shareholders in the company, respectively.

According to experts, the privatization is likely to be time-consuming. The sale price is as high as over 4 trillion won (US$3.1 billion) and the company’s 2.68 trillion won (US$2.1 billion) perpetual bonds are another difficulty. The shareholding of the bank and the corporation is estimated to reach 74 percent in the event of 100 percent common share conversion of the perpetual bonds, and then the sale price will further rise to the point of being too burdensome to acquire.

Source: BusinessKorea