A.P Moller - Maersk A/S (AMKBY) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this earnings call today as we present our first quarter results for 2026. My name is Vincent Clerk. I'm the CEO of A. P. Moller Maersk. And I would like to introduce our new CFO, Robert Ernie, who is joining me here in the room for the first time. Many of you will no doubt have the opportunity to meet Robert on the upcoming road shows and conferences. Let me start with the overall highlights for the quarter. At the macro level, we continue to see strong demand growth across all of our segments and most regions. The big exceptions was North America, which has remained weak since the start of the trade tensions about a year ago. This resilient level of demand is easily observable in our own number, but it wasn't enough to stabilize the ocean freight rates. The supply overhang there has worsened as the many new vessels delivered throughout 2025 and into 2026 have outpaced this strong demand. The Middle East conflict has required also operational adjustments, but it did not have a material financial impact in this quarter. This is mainly due to the delayed recognition of revenues and costs in Ocean. I will elaborate on this shortly on the following slides. Overall, we delivered an EBITDA of $1,800,000,000 and an EBIT of $340,000,000 impacted overwhelmingly by the lowest rates in Ocean year on year. Lower earnings led to free cash flow of negative $874,000,000 for the quarter. Looking ahead for the full year, notwithstanding the disruptions that the Middle East conflict have brought, we are maintaining our guidance given what we can see right now. On the basis of container volume markets of 2% to 4%, we guide for underlying EBIT of between negative 1,500,000,000 and a free cash flow of negative $3,000,000,000 or better. ...