The fortune of the family behind container ship and cruise giant Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC) has again become the focus of media attention.
The Aponte clan is now worth as much as $100bn, making it the richest in Switzerland and one of the wealthiest in the world, according to Le Matin Dimanche and Sonntagszeitung.
The report in the two Swiss papers asks: “How did obscure Italian shipowners amass the biggest fortune ever seen in Switzerland?”
The answer plainly lies in the container ship boom following the pandemic, when rates rocketed to record levels and asset prices spiked.
The newspapers have come up with a vastly different figure from news agency Bloomberg, whose Billionaires Index in May put the Aponte family on $19bn.
This was described as a doubling of its wealth as it went on a huge ship-buying spree.
The latest report involved talking to dozens of people, including company insiders, the newspapers said.
Family patriarch Gianluigi Aponte, 82, refused an interview, but MSC itself answered some questions for the article.
“During Covid, MSC made more money than during the whole previous decade,” the report quotes a source close to the company as saying.
However, the pandemic shut down the Switzerland-based group’s cruise ship fleet for a time.
The $19bn reported by Bloomberg was enough to make the former Italian banker and his family the 77th-richest in the world at that time.
Talks over rail investment
VesselsValue records MSC as buying more than 150 container ships since early 2021.
Meanwhile, Italian media reported that MSC is in exploratory talks with US-based Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) for a possible investment in GIP’s railway operator, Italo.
The infrastructure fund bought Italo for around €2bn ($1.94bn) in 2018.
Neither side is commenting.
La Stampa newspaper cited financial sources as saying GIP was considering the creation of an investment vehicle in which the fund could reinvest half of the resources, with MSC taking the other 50%.
The deal would value Italo at €4bn, excluding debt, it was claimed.
