Container Shipping Companies With the Most Ships 2026
About This Dataset
Container Shipping Companies With the Most Ships 2026
Number of container ships each line operates as of April 2026, owned and chartered together. Ship count and carrying capacity rank differently: a feeder operator can run many small vessels, while a line built around very large ships moves more boxes with fewer hulls.
Analysis
MSC runs 1,000 container ships, 1.4 times the 735 of Maersk. The 15 fleets here total 4,661 ships. Average capacity per ship varies widely: MSC averages 7,319 TEU a ship, against 1,758 for Unifeeder. 7 of the 15 lines operate 200 ships or more.
Source:
Alphaliner, via Wikipedia
Key Findings
🏆
MSC leads in Container Ships in Fleet with 1,000 in 2026.
📊
Average Container Ships in Fleet in 2026: 311 · median: 121.
↔️
Gap in 2026: MSC is 10.6× larger than Unifeeder.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Alphaliner, via Wikipedia
- Coverage
- 15 entities · 2026 · 15 observations
- Measure
- Container Ships in Fleet
- Last updated
- 7 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2026.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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