Skou stepping down as Maersk CEO at end of year

According to Robert Maersk Uggla, chairman of Maersk’s board, “The strong tailwinds that benefited the supply chain industries during the pandemic are coming to an end. With an increasingly challenging outlook, the board believes Vincent holds the right experience and capabilities as CEO to pursue and oversee Maersk’s strategic and organizational development in the years to come.”

Era of transformation continues

During his six-plus years as the helm, Skou oversaw a dramatic transformation of A.P. Moller – Maersk.

At the group level, the company sold its energy divisions and transformed itself from a conglomerate into a pure logistics business. The group sold its tanker division to its private entity, A.P Moller Holding, in 2018. Also that year, it sold Maersk Oil to Total S.A. In 2019, it demerged Maersk Drilling via a separate listing.

On the container shipping side, the company has focused on becoming an end-to-end logistics provider and not a commoditized ocean transportation provider. It expects this transformational strategy to pay off in the years ahead, as container shipping faces a slowdown.

Skou said on the latest conference call, “Our strategy is not to gain market share in ocean [shipping]. We’re not really defining ourselves anymore in terms of ocean volumes. Our strategy is to gain share of our customers’ wallet of logistics spend. We expect to grow [the logistics] side of the business significantly faster than the market, despite the slowdown.”

He continued, “One of the key goals of our strategic transformation is to break away from the cyclicality of the shipping industry and the commoditized nature of transactional container shipping. We remain convinced that creating closer relationships with customers and maintaining an intense focus on their needs is the way to do so.”

Era of massive profits winds down

Skou’s tenure as CEO also covered a period of unprecedented profits, as the container shipping industry reaped the rewards of pandemic-era consumer spending.

Between the second quarter of 2020 and the third quarter of 2022, A.P. Moller – Maersk posted total earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization of $61.1 billion.

Clerc will face a very different market when he takes over in January. As Skou acknowledged on the latest call: “No doubt we have a challenging year or years ahead of us. The world faces a combination of geopolitical uncertainty and inflationary pressure that we haven’t seen in quite a number of decades. It gives us very strong comfort that we enter this period with a very strong balance sheet. We are prepared to weather the storm.”

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