A.P. Moller - Maersk reports 12th quarter of successive y-o-y earnings in Q2

August 07, 2021: In the second quarter of 2021, A.P. Moller - Maersk continued to deliver strong growth and profitability, marking the 12th quarter of successive year-on-year earnings progress. Revenue grew 58 percent to $14.2 billion in Q2 and EBIT increased almost five times to $4.1 billion. The net result came in at $3.7 billion in the second quarter, bringing the net result for the first half of 2021 to $6.5 billion.

“The strong results benefited both from the exceptional circumstances in ocean, where congestions and bottlenecks continued to drive up rates, and from solid progress in executing on our strategic transformation where we kept a firm focus on our customers need for integrated solutions across their supply chains. We continue to build a higher quality ocean business with more long-term contracts, a rapidly growing logistics business, and a value creating terminals business. Our exceptional earnings and high cash flow enable us to further accelerate our transformation, invest in growing our activities, also through acquisitions and at the same time return cash to shareholders. To that effect we also announced the acquisitions of Visible SCM and B2C Europe which complements our existing supply chain offering and addresses our customers need for ecommerce logistics,” said Søren Skou of CEO A.P. Moller - Maersk.

In Ocean, profitability in Q2 was driven by revenue growth to $11.1 billion from $6.6 billion and EBIT increased to $3.6 billion from $0.5 billion. The growth came from a 15 percent rebound in volumes and an increase in average freight rates of 59 percent, as both long-terms contracts rates with key clients increased and short-term contracts were still impacted by congestions and bottlenecks.

“The outlook for Q3 is strong and we expect that the current momentum in ocean will continue into Q4, also benefitting our terminals business. Logistics & Services will continue its strong growth pattern for the rest of the year. As communicated on August 2, we have upgraded our guidance for 2021 to an underlying EBITDA of $18-19.5 billion, an EBIT of 14-15.5 billion and a free cash flow expected to be minimum $11.5 billion,” Skou said.

Ocean is still expected to grow in line with global container demand, which is now expected to grow 6-8 percent in 2021, still primarily driven by the export volumes out of China to the US.

For 2021-2022, the expectation for the accumulated CAPEX remains to be around $7 billion.

Earnings in Q3 are expected to exceed the level for Q2 2021. Trading conditions for the quarters ahead are, however, still subject to a higher-than-normal volatility due to the temporary nature of current demand patterns, disruptions in the supply chains and equipment shortages.