In a sign of MSC’s “Maerskisation”, in 2020 Mr Toft jumped ship from the Danish firm, where he had been chief operating officer.
It worked so well that alliances began to be considered the cornerstone of improved financial discipline in the industry. MSC, whose main selling point is cost, was delighted to oblige, partly to emulate Maersk’s standards of service. But in the mid-2010s it had over-ordered mega-sized vessels, and needed help filling them. It was the industry’s most punctual, best-staffed and most service-oriented carrier. Its staffing levels, as one ex-Maersk employee puts it, were “lean to the point of starvation”. MSC was infamously unreliable (its initials, an old joke went, stood for “maybe ship comes”). Imagine a budget airline like Ryanair teaming up with a plush carrier like Singapore Airlines and you get the picture. For eight years the two companies have been in an alliance, called 2 M, in which, like airlines swapping passengers in code-sharing agreements, they provide container space on each other’s vessels. It is an extraordinary parting of the ways. Whether either succeeds or not, they provide an intriguing natural experiment on different approaches to industrial commoditisation. They are doing this against the backdrop of a post-pandemic slowdown in container shipping, as well as longer-term questions about the future of globalisation. In effect, then, the number one and number two companies in an industry at the centre of world trade are placing radically different bets on the future.
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