MSC, the most mysterious shipping company in the industry, how much money did it make in the container business last year?
MSC’s liner business had roughly three times Amazon’s EBIT last year. MSC founder Gianluigi Aponte was one of the fastest-growing fortunes last year, according to Forbes’ latest survey of billionaires. Aponte’s net worth grew by $14.4 billion in the past 12 months ended March 10, according to Forbes. Aponte, 82, is tied for No. 43 on the Forbes billionaires list with his wife Rafaela, each with an estimated net worth of $31.2 billion.
According to foreign media reports, the secretive Apontes family is from Naples and its wealth is about three times that of the second-ranked family. MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, does not need to publish financial data, so we don’t know how much money MSC made last year.
However, analysts at Sea-Intelligence recently crunched figures for MSC’s container business. According to Sea-Intelligence estimates, last year, global liner shipping companies’ earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) reached a record $220 billion, while MSC accounted for 18.2% of the overall liner shipping market share.
Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, said: “Major shipping lines reporting EBIT have a strong correlation (r² of 90%) between their fleet size and EBIT, and if we assume that this relationship also applied to MSC, then MSC’s 2022 EBIT will be around $36 billion.” And, the $36 billion figure does not include MSC’s cruise business. To put that figure into perspective, MSC’s liner business had roughly three times the EBIT of Amazon last year. Moreover, the Aponte family will continue to amass billions this year despite the doom and gloom in the shipping industry during the first quarter.
Good luck for the liner industry in 2023, according to a reliable container financial forecaster, which hinted that this year could be the third-best combined annual performance in the industry’s history. John McCown predicts that the total revenue of the liner shipping industry will reach $327 billion this year, and the net income will reach $43.2 billion.
While that would mark an 80% drop in last year’s record profits, it would still be another stunningly profitable year, helping to explain how shipping lines led by MSC continue to accumulate tonnage in the first three months of 2023. According to an analysis by Sea-Intelligence, the EBIT of shipping companies in the three years of 2020, 2021, and 2022 exceeds the sum of profits in the previous 63 years.
