To have your possessions moved across the ocean you can make use of international shipping container companies to transport your goods safely and effectively. These companies are based around the world to facilitate international shipping logistics.
What will international shipping container companies do?
Many companies will not only ship your goods for you, but will also plan everything involved in the process. This includes packing the goods you need shipped, collecting these items, and shipping the packed goods to the final delivery destination. Container ships are able to carry all their cargo in containers; a technique called containerization.
Containerization allows a ship to be unloaded and loaded in a matter of hours, as opposed to the process taking a few days. This means that labour costs are cut and shipping times are reduced. Other advantages are fewer breakages as a result of less handling and less shifting of cargo. Another benefit of containerization is reduced theft and increased privacy of container contents. Each container can also have a product code traced by computers in a digital tracking system. Instead of a huge crew of people manually unloading the ship, cranes are used to load and track the storage containers. Because containerization caused more convenient shipping, international trade has grown as a result.
The big ten international shipping container companies
When choosing a company to ship your precious cargo, you will want to use a reliable and trusted company. The 10 biggest and most popular international shipping container companies are as follows:
- At number one is APM-Maersk, with a 15.5% market share in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). The company has 539 ships, resulting in an 8.91% market share.
- Mediterranean Shipping Company comes in at number two, with 1,469,865 TEU Capacity and 425 ships.
- CMA CGM Group is at number three, with 378 ships, 988,141 TEU and a 7.5% TEU market share.
These three companies are the significant leaders in the international container shipping industry, with all other companies have less than half the amount of ships than the CMA CGM Group.
- The Evergreen Line is at number four, with 624,536 TEU capacity and a fleet of 176, accounting for 2.12% of the market share.
- Number 5 is Hapag-Lloyd, who have a TEU capacity of 488,135 and 128 ships.
- COSCO Container L come in at number 6, with 148 ships and a TEU capacity of 485,796, just less than that of Hapag Lloyd.
- APL is at number 7, with 131 ships and TU capacity of 473,170.
- In eighth place is CSCL, with TEU capacity of 450,928 and 143 ships.
- The ninth largest shipping company (in terms of TEU capacity) are NYK, with 119 ships that can carry TEU of 433,000.
- The tenth largest shipping container company is Hanjin/ Senator, with a TEU capacity of 378,282 and 91 ships.
In total, these ten shipping lines have a combined TEU capacity of 13,108,859, spread of a combined total of 6,048 ships.
As the largest container shipping company, APM-Maersk was founded by Arnold Peter Moller in 1904. Since then, the company has grown to employ over 108,000 people and operates in 130 countries around the world. The group is based in Copenhagen in Denmark.
The second largest shipping group is the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC). The company is based in Geneva but operates all over the world. It serves 270 ports and has 350 local offices in six continents.
The third big guy in the shipping industry is the CMA CGM Group. This container shipping company is based in France and managed by Jacques Saadé. The CMA CGM Group uses 200 shipping routes, covering 150 countries and going between 400 ports worldwide. The headquarters of the CMA CGM Group are in Marseille,with its North American headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, in the United States.
These companies and others from an important part of international trade and without the technique of containerization this would be a much slower and far less efficient process.