A.P Moller - Maersk A/S (AMKBY) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this earning call today as we present our second quarter results for 2026. My name is Vincent Klerg. I'm the CEO of A. P. Moller - Maersk. And with me in the room today is our CFO, Robert Ernie. Let me start with the overall highlights for the second quarter. At the macro level, market demand continued unabated despite the disruptions from the war in the Gulf, driven by Far East exports on almost all trade lanes. Exports from the Far East grew for the third consecutive years, while the backhaul volumes were stagnant or negative. This has led to significantly more imbalanced trade flows and increased congestions in various regions, including Europe, the East Coast Of South America, West Africa and The Middle East, as volume levels are challenging the limits of ports and landside infrastructures in these regions. These bottlenecks quickly translated into significant and sustained increases in the spot rate from mid May, which not only had a significant effect on this quarter, but we expect will affect the outlook for the rest of the year, which I will get to shortly. If we look at the financials, on the back of higher spot rates in Ocean, we delivered an EBITDA of $3,000,000,000 and an EBIT of $1,600,000,000 Free cash flow turned positive again at $549,000,000 supported by higher earnings, albeit partially offset by a buildup in working capital driven by higher receivables as a consequence of higher rates and by bunker inventory because of higher energy prices. As you may have seen, we have upgraded our guidance for the full year. Based on market volumes growth of about 4%, we now guide for an underlying EBIT of 4,500,000,000 to $6,500,000,000 and a positive free cash flow. We'll return to the guidance later in the pre...