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A surge in demand for goods like furniture and exercise equipment from locked-down consumers has sparked a jump in shipping rates, boosting profits for Danish freight giant Maersk, the company said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
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Yet shares in the world\u2019s largest container shipping line fell as much as 8% as it missed analysts\u2019 lofty forecasts for the end of last year and gave more cautious guidance for 2021 than anticipated.<\/p>\n
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Maersk\u2019s ocean shipping business, its largest division, \u201cperformed at record level in the quarter as a consequence of the strong rebound of demand,\u201d CEO Soren Skou said in a statement.<\/p>\n
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Helped by record high freight rates and low fuel prices, fourth-quarter earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) leapt 85% to $2.71 billion from a year earlier. However, that was below the $3.06 billion forecast by analysts in a poll gathered by the company.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOur continued progress makes us confident that we will continue to grow the earnings of the company as the economic situation normalises in 2021 and beyond,\u201d Skou said.<\/p>\n
The global shipping industry quickly recovered last year from the pandemic-related halt in trade around the world, boosted in particular by higher retail sales in the United States.<\/p>\n
Maersk expects global container trade to rise 3-5% in 2021 after declining 2% last year.<\/p>\n
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The majority of consumer goods are ferried by container ship operators like Maersk. Container ships have been sailing at full load since August \u2013 something that has not happened in a decade.<\/p>\n
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Maersk expects EBITDA of $8.5 billion-$10.5 billion this year, compared with the $10.3 billion expected by analysts and $8.3 billion achieved last year.<\/p>\n
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Maersk shares were down 6.3% at 0814 GMT.<\/p>\n
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(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen. Editing by Jason Neely and Mark Potter)<\/em><\/p>\n maritime professional<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A surge in demand for goods like furniture and exercise equipment from locked-down consumers has sparked a jump in shipping rates, boosting profits for Danish freight giant Maersk, the company said on Wednesday. Yet shares in the world\u2019s largest container shipping line fell as much as 8% as it missed analysts\u2019 lofty forecasts for the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[12091,3490,93,14804,1520,2221],"class_list":["post-25443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-boosted","tag-forecasts","tag-maersk","tag-misses","tag-recovery","tag-trade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/25444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}