Comment / Vertical integration – where mentality and numbers clash

ID 476571 © Donna Cuic | Dreamstime.com

What’s left of the most prominent, prospective UPS integrator in container shipping – Denmark’s AP Møller-Mærsk (APMM) – and its peers from the days it all started five years ago, is quite straightforward.

It’s worse than nothing: at APMM, for instance, over $12bn of annual logistics services revenues whose derived returns do not make the unit’s cost of capital, as profits sag in the down cycle.

And think about CMA CGM from Marseille, a carrier affair that cheers up Mærsk with its vast perhaps-less-integrated ...