The announcement confirms the speculation on worldcargonews.com a few days ago.

The sales & purchase agreement is subject to due diligence. This process will commence soon and the sale could be cemented in the coming weeks.

However, the statement from Oetker also suggests that the requirement to obtain regulatory approvals in a number of jurisdictions will mean that the actual transfer is not likely to take place before late 2017, at the earliest.

It also makes the point that Hamburg Süd outperforms most of the market financially, and has financed fleet extension of both ships and containers from its own cash flow. Nonetheless, active participation in the ongoing consolidation in the liner industry would require additional funding to an extent that would spread the risk too much across the group – hence the need to sell.

Hamburg Süd has an annual transport volume of around 4.1M TEU and around 625,000 TEU of shipboard slot capacity. Its payroll numbers 6000 and it accounts for around 50% of Oetker group’s annual turnover of €6.1B.

Maersk has also announced the acquisition: “Today is a new milestone in Maersk Line’s history," said Søren Skou, CEO of Maersk Line and the Maersk Group. "I am very pleased that we have reached an agreement with the Oetker Group to acquire Hamburg Süd. Hamburg Süd is a very well-run and highly respected company with strong brands, dedicated employees and loyal customers. Hamburg Süd complements Maersk Line and together we can offer our customers the best of two worlds, first of all in the North – South trades,”

Importantly for Maersk, Hamburg Süd is well positioned in the reefer container business, a sector where it is in the top five global carriers, ahead of its position as the world’s seventh largest carrier by total capacity. Furthermore, around 19% of Hamburg Süd’s box fleet is reefer containers (the highest ratio in the industry) amounting to around 148,000 TEU. 

The sale could also be an important step in the shipping industry’s drive to go digital. Maersk has made a massive investment in its “RCM” remote container monitoring system for reefer containers that uses technology from Orbcomm to communicate with the reefer controllers, whereas 98% of Hamburg Süd's fleet is equipped with a Refcon RMM power-line modem from Emerson – a different technology. 

Assuming the transaction gets regulatory approvals and proceeds, it will be interesting to see how Maersk Line approaches this in the longer term. As Shereen Zarkani, Head of Reefer Management, Maersk Line recently noted at the Cool Logistics conference in Bremen, “Reefer visibility only makes sense if applied to the entire fleet”.