Mærsk controls roughly a fifth of the global market for container shipping, which makes the company a good indicator of where it is leaning in world trade.
And Mærsk now assesses that global growth will continue to be weak, at around 2 percent this year.
“There are still many clouds of worry that we have to deal with,” says Mærsk CEO Vincent Clerc to Bloomberg TV.
For the first quarter of the year, Mærsk reports a drop in operating profit of 56 percent compared to a year earlier, down to $3.97 billion. That was slightly higher than the average forecast among analysts of 3.55 billion, according to Bloomberg’s compilation of forecasts.
However, freight volumes fell by 9.4 percent during the quarter, while freight prices plunged by 37 percent.
For the full year, Mærsk expects the volume of container transport to fall by 2.5 percent and the underlying operating profit for 2023 is expected to land at 8-11 billion dollars, which is about a quarter of the annual profit in 2022.