Maersk will look to grow its business on the shore, not the seas in the coming years, group chief executive Soren Skou said in an interview.
The Danish group is looking specifically at opportunities in landside logistics and running companies’ supply chains or warehouses, Skou told the Financial Times.
Only one in five Maersk customers use the company’s services on the land side, but “one hundred per cent need a truck to get to and from the port,” he said, quoted by the paper.
Billion-dollar purchases are out, however, and any future deals would cover “small, bolt-on acquisitions to build up capability and scale”, Skou said.
Maersk’s ability to do more deals is being held back by its weakening credit rating and Skou said maintaining an investment-grade rating was critical, according to the interview.
“I would not want to take any deliberate decisions that make us less than investment-grade rating. You can lose it if the markets are against you or the company doesn’t perform,” he told the paper.
Maersk is reorganising its structure from a conglomerate with eight divisions into one company, which will involve between 500-100 job losses.
Over the past three years, the Danish group has sold off its oil and gas unit, its tanker business and is hoping to spin off Maersk Drilling this year.
If Maersk Drilling is demerged during 2019, the company will have completed about $18bn of transactions in the past three years.
