Container shipping companies worldwide - number of ships 2022

As of April 30, 2022, the Danish container shipping company APM-Maersk was operating the most container ships in the world. While having 731 container ships in its fleet, APM-Maersk owned only 339 vessels, the rest was chartered. The company's fleet had a total capacity of roughly 4.4 million twenty-foot equivalent units in 2022.

Standardization of the capacity of containers

Global seaborne trade was revolutionized in the 1950s, when the intermodal container became ready for commercialization. Prior to the introduction of standard containers, cargo shipping used to be a lot more expensive, as well as time-consuming. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defined the capacity of intermodal containers, making the twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) a standard measure used in the transportation industry. Today, between 80 and 90 percent of containers shipped around the world are either forty or twenty foot standard length containers.