Shipping giant A.P. Moller – Maersk has had a strong start to the year, with strong earnings and growth momentum across all our businesses in ocean, port services, and logistics.
High demand as well as significant operational challenges such as bottlenecks, lack of capacity, and equipment shortage in global supply chains drove freight rates up significantly.
The company saw an underlying EBITDA of USD $13.0-15.0bn, (£9.3bn), previously $8.5-10.5bn, compared to $8.3bn, (£5.8bn) in 2020.
Maersk’s Logistics & Services division continued to see a strong growth momentum and revenue increase of 42% in Q1 to $2bn, (£1.4bn), mainly driven by ‘organic growth’, alongside growth from the purchasing of Performance Team and KGH Customs Services.
Søren Skou, CEO of A.P. Moller – Maersk said: “We remain focused on the long-term transformation of A.P. Moller – Maersk, prioritising customers’ demand for integrated logistics. Our integrator strategy was validated by strong customer support during Q1.
As we change the conversations with customers from being short-term transactional to becoming long-term value-based, we lay the foundation for further, stable growth.”
He added: “Overall, we can be very satisfied with how the business performed this quarter. High profitability led to a ROIC of 15.7% and our strong free cash flow gives us the opportunity to invest further in the transformation of the business, while accelerating the remaining part of the ongoing share buy-back programme and subsequently launch a new, additional share buy-back programme of approx. $5bn, (£3.6bn), over the coming two years.”
