MSC: Gianluigi Aponte's First Used Ship to the MSC Gayane Cocaine Bust

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Mediterranean Shipping Company began in 1970, when Naples sea captain Gianluigi Aponte and his wife Rafaela bought a secondhand cargo ship, the Patricia, followed by a second named Rafaela, and ran a single line from the Mediterranean to Somalia. With no outside investors, the family kept buying used ships cheaply during downturns and in 1978 moved headquarters to Geneva for financial and regulatory stability. MSC ordered its first newly built ships in 1994, which arrived around 1996. In January 2022 it passed Maersk as the world's largest container line, and by late 2025 it controlled over 21 percent of global container capacity, about 7 million TEU, with around 900 ships and 200,000 employees, including the MSC Oscar and MSC Irina, each able to carry more than 24,000 containers. Diego Aponte became CEO in 2014, former Maersk executive Søren Toft became the first non-family CEO in 2020, and in April 2026 ownership passed to Diego, now group president, and Alexa, group CFO.

MSC Cruises, started in 1988, is now the third largest cruise company. The family added MSC Air Cargo with Boeing 777 freighters in 2022, the Medway rail business, 45 port terminals through Terminal Investment Limited, Bolloré Africa Logistics, Brazil's Wilson Sons, half of Hamburg's main terminal operator and the Italian daily Il Secolo XIX. The fleet has faced the MSC Carla breaking in half in 1997, the MSC Napoli beached in Britain during storm Kyrill in 2007, 345 containers lost from the MSC Zoe in 2019 and the MSC Baltic III running aground off Newfoundland in 2025. In 2019 U.S. authorities found 20 tons of cocaine worth an estimated $1.3 billion on the MSC Gayane in Philadelphia, which investigators tied to Balkan crime groups that had corrupted crew and port workers.

• Smugglers broke container seals at ports, loaded drugs and resealed them with cloned or 3D-printed seals.
• Speedboats met cargo ships at night so corrupted crew could hoist duffel bags of cocaine aboard.
• Iran seized the MSC Aries in April 2024, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized the MSC Francesca in April 2026.
• Houthi attacks in the Red Sea since late 2023 damaged several MSC ships and pushed the line off the route.
• In March 2025 a ship at the port of Odesa was damaged by the shockwave of Russian Iskander missile strikes.