The world’s largest container shipping company, Mediterranean Shipping Co., known as MSC, continues to break records. the leadership of Soren Toft, the Geneva-based container shipping line’s fleet size has surpassed 7 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), according to latest data from Alphaliner.

MSC’s current fleet stands at 7,002,757 TEU, plus more than 2 millionU in newbuild orders.

In comparison to other companies, MSC’s current fleet size is now larger than the combined fleet size of the Gemini Alliance, which Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd’s competitor in the major east-west trade lanes. Similarly, MSC’s current fleet size, not including its new orders, is also larger than the combined fleet size of the members of the Premier Alliance, which is a grouping of Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp., Hyundai Merchant Marine and Ocean Network Express (ONE).

According to Alphaliner, MSC last week acquired the 2007-built, 3,534 TE “Newnew Star 2” from Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping. The vessel is expected to be renamed “MSC Rabat IV”. This ship is one about 400 secondhand vessels that MSC has acquired in the 2020s, and it was this acquisition that pushed the carrier’s fleet size over 7 million mark, a size that its peers will find difficult to match in the short term.

MSC has expanded threefold over the past decade through a massive new program and its historic involvement in the secondhand market. In early 2022, MSC surpassed Maersk as the world’s largest shipping company by operational container capacity, a position Maersk had led for more than twenty-five years.

MSC’s expansion has also made Switzerland, a landlocked country, one of world’s top ten shipowners. In January of this year, online pricing portal VesselsValue released its annual top ten shipowner nations ranked by total asset value, with ranked in ninth place thanks to MSC’s container and cruise ship fleets.