Maersk Investors Brace for ‘Bleak’ Quarters Ahead
Industry Suffers From Low Freight Rates on Red Sea Disruptions, Tariff Troubles
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A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S shares fell with investor disappointment over a smaller-than-expected improvement in the container shipping giant’s full-year profit guidance.
Maersk’s underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization will be in a range of $9 billion to $9.5 billion in 2025, versus a prior guidance that put the low end at $8 billion, the Copenhagen-based company said in a statement on Nov. 6. Analysts on average estimated $9.11 billion.
Maersk also improved its guidance for the global container market, seeing expansion of about 4% this year, compared with a previous forecast of 2% to 4%. Its third-quarter earnings beat estimates.
Still, the shares declined as much as 7.5% in Copenhagen, the most since April.
“The third quarter is a bit of a bubble. Yes, it’s a good report, but everything points to very difficult earnings conditions ahead,” Mikkel Emil Jensen, senior analyst at Sydbank A/S, said by phone. “Investors can’t really take comfort in strong quarterly numbers when the future looks so bleak.”
The industry is starting to suffer from lower freight rates as the disruption in the Red Sea — which effectively is taking out about 7-8% of the world’s fleet — isn’t able to make up for an oversupply of ships. At the same time, China-U.S. trade is slowing amid the tariff war.
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“With the result they’ve delivered in the third quarter and still a weak guidance, it really just signals very tough earnings conditions for Ocean — not only in the fourth quarter, but beyond,” Jensen said.
That’s also putting a damper on hopes the company would continue buying back its own shares further next year.
“It’s very hard to imagine Maersk doing share buybacks while posting negative earnings and pressure on cash flow,” Jensen said. “That would be burning the candle at both ends.”
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ranks No. 6 on the Transport Topics list of the Top 50 Global Freight carriers.
Maersk represents a bellwether for global trade that’s undergoing massive gyrations as the US administration reshapes the rules by which it does business with the world.
The Red Sea disruption is expected to last for the full year, Maersk said. That’s helped with some of the vessel overcapacity globally, raising freight rates earlier in the year. More recently, the cost of carrying goods has fallen, eroding shipping profits.
At the end of the quarter, the world’s nominal fleet was 7.6% larger than at the same time in 2024, Maersk said.
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Speaking in an interview before market open, CEO Vincent Clerc spoke of the company’s strength.
“The key message of this quarter is a message of resilience — resilience of the global economy, which continues to fuel a very strong demand across the different businesses that we’re in and resilience also of our operation,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg TV.
“China is the engine of this,” he said. “A lot of it is coming from the manufacturing capacity that there is in China that devotes a lot of its focus on export-led growth to maybe deal with some of the domestic sluggish demand that they have.”
