Frankfurt (Reuters) - Germany's largest container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd is seeking to join forces with the Danish shipping company Maersk and is leaving the shipping alliance "THE Alliance".

The two companies are planning a long-term cooperation from February next year and want to create a fleet pool of around 290 ships with a combined capacity of 3.4 million standard containers (TEU), as both sides announced on Wednesday. Maersk, the world's second-largest container shipping company, intends to contribute a 60 percent share, with the remainder coming from Hapag-Lloyd - the number five in the market. By working together under the name "Gemini Cooperation", the companies aim to achieve a schedule reliability of over 90 percent.

As a result of the agreement, Hapag-Lloyd intends to leave "THE Alliance", which was founded in 2017 and which the Hamburg-based company currently operates with Japan's ONE, YangMing from Taiwan and South Korea's HHM, at the end of January 2025. Maersk, in turn, was part of the "2M Alliance" with global market leader MSC - however, the two companies had already announced a year ago that they would be going their separate ways in future and that this alliance would end after ten years in January 2025.

Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen said in March last year that he did not expect the end of 2M to have a massive impact on other alliances and that his company's membership of "THE Alliance" would continue until 2030. However, according to shipping company circles, it is easier for Hapag-Lloyd to have just one partner instead of three. The Hanseatic company and Maersk are a good fit, as both focus strongly on reliability - which has been crucial for customers since the coronavirus crisis disrupted supply chains and drove up freight rates.

According to Michael Kruse, the FDP parliamentary group's rapporteur for ports and a member of the Hamburg Bundestag, Hapag-Lloyd's cooperation with Maersk has the potential to further weaken Hamburg as a port location. This is because the focus of the two shipping companies should be on ports in which they have terminal holdings. Hapag-Lloyd had been weakened by the entry of its rival MSC into the Hamburg port operator HHLA. "The full damage of this measure for the port location is now becoming clear step by step."

Hapag-Lloyd CEO Habben Jansen emphasized that the new alliance is designed in such a way that each partner can decide for itself when and where to expand its business. "The spirit of the cooperation is that we are not tying each other down, but are both able to implement their own strategy." Hapag-Lloyd will expand its business primarily in the German ports of Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven, while Hamburg will become less important for the Group. Talks on the new alliance with Maersk had already begun before Hamburg's decision on MSC's participation had been made. There are no plans to integrate further members into the new alliance.

Maersk and MSC entered into their alliance in 2015 in order to coordinate routes and the occupancy of their ships. The EU tolerated such alliances during the shipping crisis in the middle of the last decade because the shipping companies remained operationally independent and assumed that competition would not be restricted as a result. For the ports, however, such mergers meant that the shipping companies gained greater influence over where the goods went. This allowed the shipping companies to influence the prices at the terminals. Several alliances were formed at the time: In addition to 2M and "THE Alliance", there was also the "Ocean Alliance" with CMA, Cosco and others. Prior to this, the shipping companies had engaged in a ruinous price war, which led to several takeovers.

(Report by Patricia Weiß and Vera Eckert, edited by Hans Busemann. If you have any queries, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)