If you’ve ever been on a highway in the U.S. (or pretty much any country), MAERSK containers are hard to miss on the back of trucks. Gigantic MAERSK cargo ships have been in the news and in a lot of movies. All this time I thought the company was from Russia for some reason.

The family business, and largest container shipping company in the world, is actually from a much smaller nation.

Shipping companies measure themselves by twenty-foot equivalent (TEU) unit capacity. Technically, The Mediterranean Shipping Company (out of Switzerland via Italy?) has out-paced Maersk in 2021 by a little over 2,000 units (out of many millions). Since Maersk has 738 ships to MSC’s 645, and they are actually business partners with split market share anyway, I’d say Maersk is arguably the largest.

The global giant was founded in 1904 by a father-son team of the Møller family in Svendborg, Denmark. Mærsk was the father’s middle name. His grandson would go on the be CEO from 1965 until 2003 at the age of 90. Although publicly traded, Maersk is still controlled by the Møllers with 70% voting power.

Though most of the $62 billion in annual revenue comes from the shipping business, there are over 900 subsidiary companies with 83,000 employees. Maersk is also in the oil and gas transport business, drilling, salvage, towing, and undersea services.

As of 2021, Maersk operates eight carbon-neutral vessels. I’m not sure how those work. The same year they joined the BEC Low-Carbon Charter.

Since it’s hard to make that kind of money without being shady, the Danish company is not without criticism. The U.S. doesn’t have a shipping firm of its own that even cracks the top 20, so Maersk gets a lot of government business. The Department of Justice has issued tens of millions of dollars in fines over the years. When you have billions on the books annually, what’s a few million here and there?

Nefarious activities include things like labor rights violations and abusive conditions in places like El Salvador and China. Maersk also likes to do business with countries under U.S. embargo like Iran and Sudan, which doesn’t make Uncle Sam very happy. They were also caught and fined for overcharging the U.S. military for shipping services to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Remember the 2013 Somali piracy movie with Tom Hanks? That was about the ship Maersk Alabama. They probably mentioned that the company was from Denmark at some point in the film. Perhaps if I paid more attention I would have known that Maersk isn’t Russian.