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The container ship “Berlin Express” from the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd arrives in the port of Hamburg and is turned.
© Bodo Marks/dpa
2022 was the best year in Hapag-Lloyd's history due to the consequences of the pandemic on supply chains.
Now the situation has normalized.
Nevertheless, the shipping company recorded the third-best result ever in 2023.
Hamburg - An oversupply of ships on the world's oceans, weakening global trade and the ongoing violence of the Houthi militia against merchant ships in the Red Sea: The Hamburg container shipping company Hapag-Llloyd sees itself in difficult waters during the corona pandemic after its gold-bordered balance sheets.
According to an initial forecast, there could even be losses this year.
Earnings before taxes and interest (EBIT) will range from minus 1 to plus 1 billion euros in the current year, it was said on Thursday.
“There is roughly a black zero in the middle and I hope that we don’t end up in the red,” said CEO Rolf Habben Jansen.
“But there are just a lot of uncertainties.”
During the pandemic, all shipping companies benefited from disruptions in supply chains with a lack of capacity and high demand for sea transport.
Prices, or freight rates in industry jargon, skyrocketed.
The bottom line is that this gave Hapag-Lloyd an unprecedented profit of around 17 billion euros in 2022 - and the shareholders a dividend of 63 euros per share.
For 2023, after an expected slump in profits, the bottom line was still 2.95 billion euros.
It was the third best year in the history of the world's fifth largest container shipping company, with a fleet of currently 266 ships.
Hapag-Lloyd wants to pay out 9.25 euros per share.
The group profit was even higher than the group EBIT of 2.5 billion euros, “since we generated a positive financial result thanks to our high liquidity,” as CFO Mark Frese said.
If current forecasts are anything to go by, profits are unlikely to be anywhere close to being reached again in 2024.
Habben Jansen spoke of a challenging time.
Only after 2025 and 2026 “will we hopefully return to a normal situation,” said the CEO, who has been in office since 2014.
His contract was extended early by the Supervisory Board until the end of March 2029.
The Hapag-Llloyd Group's sales shrank to almost 17.8 billion euros in 2023, which was just under half of the sales in the record year of 2022. The main reason for this was a roughly stable transport volume of 11.9 million standard containers (TEU). Compared to 2022, the average freight rate has almost halved to around 1,500 euros per TEU.
The decline in freight rates accelerated towards the end of the year - management speaks of an “unsustainably low” level.
Ultimately, Hapag-Lloyd even had to post a negative EBIT in the final quarter of 2023 for the first time since 2016.
However, with the start of the Houthi attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea at the beginning of 2024, freight rates have increased noticeably again, also because the shipping companies' diversions of their ships around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa are taking longer can drive faster and transports are therefore more expensive.
It is unclear how long this situation will last and what effects this will have on the business figures.
“The lives of our workforce are far more important than a longer travel time of seven days,” said Habben Jansen.
“So we're waiting until this normalizes.” Because the attacks only began in mid-December, the financial impact will only become apparent with the figures for the first quarter, which are due to be presented in mid-May.
dpa