Shipping expert and analyst Lars Jensen believes a new merger between two shipping giants is “inevitable” in the near future.

The news about the future split between MSC and Maersk, effective January 2025, sent a wave of speculations about what could happen to the other alliances in the business. One of them is the Ocean Alliance between COSCO, CMA CGM, OOCL and Evergreen.

During his participation at the Trans-Pacific Maritime 2023 conference (TPM) in Long Beach, California, Jensen said, “The next thing I expect to happen is a divorce announcement from Ocean Alliance and my expectation is that it is going to happen sometime here in 2023,” reported Shipping Watch.

On the other hand, Jensen believes if more alliances are terminated, this could lead to a possible merger among carriers.

”There are not a lot of mergers left among the big carriers. The only big one that is still out there is going to be when Hapag-Lloyd and ONE merge with each other,” said Jensen. ”In my view that is going to happen in 2025 or 2026.”

He added, that this “will create a carrier landscape where you have an MSC that is substantially larger than the other ones, then you will have a very large segment of carriers right below consisting of Maersk, CMA, COSCO and a combined Hapag-ONE.”

The changes that the market is witnessing at the moment inspired carriers to adopt different strategies for the future, and this was mainly what triggered the end of the 2M Alliance. It is possible that others could follow suit, the analyst believe.