Maersk: A Star on the SS Laura, the NotPetya Attack and a 0.6% Tax Rate

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Maersk's seven-pointed white star dates to 1886, when Danish captain Peter Mærsk Møller, aboard the steamship SS Laura with his gravely ill wife Anna, saw a single star break through an overcast sky and painted it on the ship's funnel. The family business founded in 1904 now operates in about 130 countries with more than 100,000 employees, and its 2025 revenue topped $53 billion. In 2021 it held about 17 percent of global container capacity, and its Triple E class ships each carry 18,000 containers. In the late 2010s Maersk shed Maersk Oil, offshore drilling rigs and stakes in Danish supermarket chains such as Netto to focus on moving goods end to end, through APM Terminals ports, the tug operator Svitzer until its demerger in early 2024, inland rail and an air cargo wing.

That reach exposed the company to shocks. In 2017 the NotPetya malware, which started in compromised Ukrainian tax software, wiped Maersk's domain controllers, froze terminals and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Somali piracy cost an estimated $100 million a year, and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea forced the fleet around the Cape of Good Hope. Maersk emitted 37 million tons of CO2 in 2021, and DTU Aqua researchers found that its scrubbers moved heavy metals from the air into the sea. In 2023 it launched the Laura Maersk, the world's first methanol-powered container ship, with a goal of CO2 neutrality by 2040. Under Denmark's tonnage tax it paid about 0.6 percent on a 2021 profit of roughly $16 billion, and it lobbied successfully to keep shipping out of the OECD's 15 percent global minimum tax.

• In 2008 one Maersk ship was calculated to emit as much sulfur dioxide in a year as 50 million cars.
• Maersk signed a deal with China's Goldwind for half a million tons of wind-produced green methanol a year by 2026.
• It was the first shipping company to have its emissions targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative.
• U.S. Merchant Marine Academy students known as Midshipmen X and Midshipmen Y sued over sexual abuse at sea, and Maersk suspended personnel and pledged policy changes.
• Mask Off Maersk protesters in Spain, Denmark and Morocco targeted military cargo to Israel; Maersk stopped shipping to Israeli settlements but, as of 2025, still carried F-35 parts.