A new largest container ship in the world has been launched, MSC takes over from Maersk as the largest container shipping company, and container rates have broken a new barrier. There's no end to it in the logistics world.

The title 'World's Largest Container Ship' held by HMM was taken over by Evergreen last year with a 28 TEU difference. While the Ever Ace remains just under the 24,000 TEU mark, its sister ship is about to cross it with heels. The 24,004 TEU container giant is launched at the end of 2021. Following the Ever Alot are the Ever Apex and Ever Atop with similar capacity.

While Evergreen and HMM have the largest container ships in service in the world, Maersk and MSC are at the top of the list for total container capacity. The Danish group has 4,249,659 slots of TEU available and is followed by the Swiss-Italian shipping company with only 10,817 TEU less. MSC has almost four times as much new ship capacity on order as Maersk: 58 ships totaling 993,000 TEU versus 25 totaling 255,000 TEU. So it's only a matter of time until Maersk is knocked off its throne.

The index and average rate of global container rates reached a new milestone on New Year's Eve. Carrying a container from Shanghai to Europe reached a new record high of $7751 per TEU. For the first time in history, the index passed the 5,000 point mark. This was published by Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI).

In May 2020, when the corona crisis was at its beginning, container rates were indexed at 800 points. This was the beginning of the container craze. A year later, just after the Ever-Given incident in the Suez Canal, the 3000 point mark was hit. Three months later, in mid-July, following the closure of container terminals in China's logistics heartland, Shenzhen the 4000. By the end of 2021, the index stood at a whopping 5046.66 points.