Container shipping

The one thing to understand before anything else

If you're moving abroad and shipping your belongings by container, it's natural to look up "the biggest shipping company" and assume that's who you call. In practice, it almost never works that way. Ocean carriers like MSC, Maersk, and CMA CGM sell space on their ships in bulk, port-to-port, almost entirely to freight forwarders, NVOCCs (non-vessel-operating common carriers), and moving companies — not to individual households. A household move by sea container is arranged through a mover or an international relocation company, who then books the slot space on one of these carriers' vessels on your behalf, handles the packing, customs paperwork, and door-to-door logistics that the shipping line itself doesn't provide.

Ocean carriers vs. moving companies: who do you actually book with?

Top container shipping lines by fleet capacity

Ranked by TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) capacity — the standard industry measure of how much cargo a fleet can carry, not revenue, not fleet age, not service quality. Fleet rankings shift month to month as ships are delivered, scrapped, or chartered; the figures below reflect an Alphaliner data snapshot retrieved 2026-04-30, and are labeled approximate for that reason.

¹ Pending change: In February 2026, Hapag-Lloyd (rank 5) signed a merger agreement to acquire ZIM (rank 10) for approximately $4.2 billion. As of this page's last review, ZIM continues to operate as an independent carrier — this table will be updated once the acquisition closes and fleet integration is confirmed.

Why this list stops at 30, not 100

Alphaliner — the industry's authoritative source for these rankings — publishes a "Top 100" list, but the full ranking beyond roughly the top 20-30 carriers sits behind a paid subscription; freely available republications (Wikipedia, trade press) consistently stop around rank 30, because that's as far as any secondary source has individually verified, dated figures for. We'd rather tell you that than publish invented numbers for carriers 31-100 to hit a round figure. Below rank 30, container shipping is dominated by small regional, feeder, and single-country carriers (heavily concentrated in Chinese domestic/coastal trade) — real companies, but without a public, citable capacity figure attached to most of them.

Names we found below rank 30, without a verifiable current capacity figure (listed for completeness, not ranked — do not imply these are ordered by size). All are China-focused regional/coastal carriers per historical Alphaliner-sourced rank mentions in industry press (2023-2024); current rank and capacity not independently verified for this page.

Zhonggu Shipping, Shanghai Jinjiang Shipping, China United Shipping (CU Lines), Yangpu Xinyuan Shipping, Taicang Port Container Shipping, Dalian Jifa Bohai Rim Container Shipping, Tianjin Datong Shipping, Dalian Trade Wind Shipping, Guangxi Hongxiang Shipping.

A cautionary example of why "current" matters here: SeaLead Shipping (Singapore) ranked as high as 13th in early 2025, but was sanctioned by the US Treasury in July 2026 over Iran-linked vessel chartering and entered voluntary liquidation the same month. It's excluded entirely from the table above — a reminder that this list needs the stated review cadence, not a one-time publish.

How the alliances work

Most of the largest carriers operate within one of three shipping alliances — vessel-sharing agreements where competing carriers pool ships and swap cargo space on shared routes, rather than each running their own full network. As of this review: Gemini Cooperation (Maersk + Hapag-Lloyd), Ocean Alliance (CMA CGM, COSCO, Evergreen, OOCL), and Premier Alliance (ONE, Yang Ming, HMM). MSC — the largest carrier by capacity — operates independently, outside any alliance.

Container shipping alliances explained

Terms worth knowing

TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit)

The standard unit for measuring container ship and port capacity — one 20-foot container = 1 TEU; a standard 40-foot container = 2 TEU. Fleet rankings are measured this way, not by number of ships alone (a carrier with fewer, larger ships can outrank one with more, smaller ships).

NVOCC (non-vessel-operating common carrier)

A company that books container space on real ocean carriers' vessels and resells it, often in smaller quantities than the carrier deals in directly (like LCL — less than container load) — many international movers operate as, or work through, an NVOCC.

Alliance vs. carrier

An alliance is an operating agreement between competing carriers, not a merger — Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd remain separate, competing companies that happen to share vessel space under Gemini Cooperation.

Frequently asked questions