Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we present the first quarter 2023 results. My name is Vincent Clerc, CEO of A.P. Moller-Maersk, and I am joined today by our CFO, Patrick Jany. Can skip that. Yeah. When we last met in February, we expected a continuation of lower volumes driven by the inventory correction, and that is indeed what we saw this quarter. Similar to our Q4 2022, these lower volumes were felt across all segments. The environment, and therefore our first quarter results, were very much in line with internal expectations. Overall, the company is performing well during this period of extreme market normalization. Q1 2023, we generated $14.2 billion of revenue and delivered an EBIT margin of 16.4%.
While the absolute numbers are significantly below those of prior year, in the wider context and compared to our pre-pandemic performance, this is still an outstanding quarterly result. The headwinds we face, including continued uncertainty about consumer behaviors, are quite clear, and we have started to proactively manage costs. We will intensify and adjust those efforts as necessary, depending on the direction of the winds. Given the progression of the past quarter, we maintain our guidance for the full year 2023, which is based on essentially flat ocean rates and an anticipated improvement of volumes in the second half of the year. Let's take a look now at the segment performance in the quarter, starting on slide 5. Although the normalization of the ocean industry is proceeding as anticipated, inventory destocking has been the red thread in this cycle.
Over the quarter, we worked to dynamically adjust capacity and maintain strong utilization at 88% on offered capacity. We can see that the rest of the industry is also using those tools of blankings and idling so that during the quarter, rates have stabilized. This is encouraging. We are also pleased to see the 2023 contract negotiation season progressing as expected, and that our customers continue to see value in deeper contractual relationship with us despite all of the fluctuations. To date, we have signed about 75% of our anticipated annual contract volumes. Similar to the previous quarter, we are signing contracts trending towards, but still above spot rates. Looking forward into the year, much about the volumes and rate development in the second half of the year remains uncertain.
We continue to believe in a recovery of volumes, given the industry order book, the supply side risks that we flagged last time remain. As I mentioned earlier, we have been engaging in proactive cost containment, which is most visible in Ocean. There we can see that the colleagues have dusted off the old playbook, and that we have successfully used before. This quarter, we implemented slow steaming, improved our network design by dynamically managing capacity, using more efficient vessels, and improving our utilization. We will continue those efforts throughout the year. Finally, you may notice that we have adjusted our view on contracts and shipments this year. Now we include all volumes in the view as long-haul volumes take an increasing share and have restated the previous years.
Nonetheless, we continue to believe that when we look on a full year basis, we still have about 70% of our volumes on contract, underscoring the stability of our contract demand. Moving to slide 6, in logistics and services, we see the effect of the continued destocking. Our revenue was up 21%, but this is entirely due to the consolidation of our acquisitions made last year, LF Logistics, Pilot, and Senator. As on an organic basis, we saw a 9% revenue decline. From the public data available, we can see that the vertical of retail, lifestyle, and consumer goods, as well as the geographies of North America and Europe, have led the destocking behaviors and volume decline in those past two quarters.
Given the acquisitions we have made, we have a strong exposure to these geographies and vertical, which underscores the challenge for our L&S segment. That said, and to add some positive color, we're able to partially offset lower volumes with new commercial wins in the same geographies. These wins help to buffer the double-digit decline that we saw from some larger customers and demonstrate that our integrated product offering continues to land well with these large customers. We can report that although we have had negative organic revenue growth from our top 200 Ocean customers, they still perform best and took a lower share of the overall organic decline. On the terminal on slide 7, we find a similar story, not only about volumes, but also about exposure to North America.
This is where we have seen the steepest decline in import volume since Q3 2022 and is also where we saw the worst port congestion build up about 18 months ago. That congestion has released, we now see the double effect of lower volumes and lower storage income. Here too, I'm pleased to see the strong cost control. Despite the difficult environment, Terminals has been able to keep the underlying profit and essentially stable by reducing cost per move while increasing underlying revenue per move through CPI-based tariff increase. This can be seen in the excellent ROIC of nearly 12%, which is a remarkable achievement in this market. Turning to slide 8, let's review where we stand in terms of delivering on our long-term KPIs. This quarter, we are flashing mostly green across the board.
Although, as we move through the year and the normalization effects are felt, we will certainly face challenges, particularly on organic revenue growth target for our NNS as well as its EBIT margin. It is important to remember here that although we report on these targets on a quarterly last 12 months basis, we are really aiming for the full year number. There we feel we continue to be on track. Moving to slide 9. Before I finish up with guidance, I would like to give you a high level view on the proof points we aim to deliver in the coming years as we're faced with these new market circumstances. For 2023, it is clear to deliver growth and profitability for our Logistics and Services segment despite the challenges faced by the industry.
It won't be easy and much rests on our performance in the second half of the year. After enjoying extraordinarily strong market conditions over the past few years, now is the time to prove that our logistics growth wasn't simply a function of ocean success. I believe deeply in the integrated strategy, and now we need to show that it works. In the background for the past several years, we have been working on our technology platform. On the one hand, we have a lot of legacy system to consolidate and rationalize. On the other, what we are trying to accomplish in terms of creating an integrated platform for our end-to-end logistics offering has not been done before, so the bar is high.
Nonetheless, by mid-2024, our aim is to launch elements of our new tech platforms so that we can go beyond localized solutions and drive scalable growth in truly integrated global logistics. Finally, by 2025, we will have regained full control, full operational independence and flexibility on Ocean. We are looking forward to the launch of a more modular, integrated network, combining the strength of all our divisions, bringing significant efficiency gains and lower volatility, as well as providing our customers with superior flexibility and service levels. To close with our guidance here on slide 10. As I have mentioned previously, given the economic development in line with expectations, our guidance remains unchanged. We continue to expect a recovery in volumes in the second half of the year. Although beyond some demand stabilization, we do not yet see signs of significant recovery and risks to consumer demand remain.
Our global GDP growth expectations are still therefore muted at 1.8%, and we continue to expect the ocean container market growth to be in the range from -2.5% to +0.5% for the full year. Based on these assumptions, for the full year 2023, we expect an underlying EBITDA of $8 billion-$11 billion, an underlying EBIT of $2 billion-$5 billion, and a free cash flow of at least $2 billion. Our cumulative CapEx for 2022-2023 is also unchanged at $9 billion-$10 billion, and we introduced a new cumulative target for 2023-2024 of $10 billion-$11 billion. As we guided in February, we have taken an impairment and restructuring charge as part of our brand unification exercise.
Some amount remains from the initially guided $450 million. I will now turn over to Patrick, who will guide us through the financial highlights.
Thank you, Vincent. Allow me to also welcome everyone on the call today. As Vincent just discussed, Q1 2023 was very much in line with our expectation of a continuation of the inventory correction in the first half across the whole business and rates coming off their peak levels in Ocean. This implies that the figures we discussed today represent the peak quarter of the year as the progressive erosion of contract rates in Ocean towards spot levels will be the main element determining profitability in the next quarters. Based on this, the revenue of $14.2 billion and an EBITDA of $4 billion were logically, significantly below prior year, but still at a strong level with EBITDA margin of nearly 28% and an EBIT margin of over 16%.
Our free cash flow was strong as well at $4.2 billion and benefited from favorable working capital movement, which I will address later. Following our AGM on March 28th and the approval of the proposed dividend of DKK 4,300 per share, we returned $9.4 billion in the form of dividends. When including the share buyback executed in the quarter, this sums up to a cash return to shareholders of $10.1 billion. Despite the significant payout, we retained a net cash position of $7 billion at quarter's end, which supports our continuing CapEx and ongoing share buyback plans. Now let us take a look at the development of cash flow in details on slide 13.
Starting with our operating cash flow on the left, in Q1, we generated $5.3 billion, driven by our EBITDA of $4 billion, as well as a favorable swing of approximately $1.3 billion in working capital, given the contraction of the business compared to last year. As we have now experienced most of the leveling out for the balance of the year, we expect significantly less net cash release from working capital.
Our gross CapEx was $838 million on Q1, which is in line with our full year guidance, but was nearly 40% lower than the prior year quarter, as in Q1 2022, we made a down payment for our green methanol-enabled vessels, which inflated the previous year figure. The biggest cash event in Q1 was a significant return to shareholders of $10.1 billion, for the payment of which we reduced our short-term deposits by $7.8 billion. The strong cash generation in the quarter allowed to keep a strong net cash position of $7 billion, which is really based on a cash and deposit number of $22.3 billion, to be compared with $28.6 billion by Q4 2022. Please note that we have moved the corresponding slide with the details of the total cash and deposits to the appendix.
Slide 14 visualizes the normalization happening in ocean after the peak earnings in 2021 and 2022. Revenue was 37% lower, driven primarily by a similar drop in rates and to a lesser degree by lower volumes, which were 9.4% below previous year. As we noted on a group level, the Q1 EBIT margin of close to 20% is still far in excess of what we achieved pre-pandemic. The protection that our long-term contracts offered in Q1 was the reason for that. If we turn to slide 15, we can see this rate effect in clear detail. We can also see that the organization has performed well in cost containment by moving proactively, helping to mitigate some of the rate effects.
In the container handling cost line, we can see the effect of lower detention and demurrage charges as port congestions released, which is part of the behavioral costs we discussed last year. In addition, as mentioned previously, we implemented slow steaming across the board in Q1, which led to a decrease in bunker consumption. This savings explain the majority of the gain in network cost, excluding bunker price. The savings were still compounded by some revenue recognition effect. Moving to slide 16, as we described last quarter, when thinking about the progression of rates over the course of 2023, we expect to see some benefit from previous contract rates in the first half of the year, but that this benefit will disappear as contracts are progressively renegotiated and new rates are implemented.
Indeed, this has been the case, also in Q1, with average rates dropping nearly 37% on an annual basis and nearly 26% on a sequential basis. In fact, this is now the second quarter where we have seen a mid 20% sequential drop. We have seen our contract negotiation season progress very much according to plan, with continued strong interest in contracts and rates progressively moving towards spot rates. When it comes to our average operating fleet capacity, you can see the efforts on controlling capacity with a reduction of just over 1% sequentially compared to Q4 2022, while volumes dropped 3% in the same period.
When it comes to our definition of the share of contract versus spot volume, given that our long-haul volumes takes an increasing share of the total and short-term volumes also have a rising contract share, we decided to simplify our reporting and report the share of contracts on our total volumes. This gives a simpler and holistic view, and we have restated accordingly. Nonetheless, we believe that for the full year 2023, we will still hit our previous target of a 70/30 contract versus shipment split, as we can see that our customers value the contractual relationship with us, and we also value that tighter relationship as it is a key to selling a greater share of logistics services and executing our integrator strategy. Finally, our share of multi-year contracts was stable with $1.8 million FFEs at the end of the first quarter.
On slide 17, you can see that our cost containments efforts led to a cost reduction of 9.6%. As mentioned, we made wider use of slow steaming, which led to 11% decrease in bunker consumption, more than compensating for the slightly higher average bunker price. Despite the volume decrease of over 9%, we were able to keep the unit cost at fixed bunker to a minimal gain of 1% or 2.9% once adjusted for the financial impact of the exit from Russia in Q1 2022. I would also like to note here that we performed our annual review on the bunker cost used for this calculation.
This year, based on the price evolution over the previous year, we made the decision to increase the price at which we benchmark the fixed bunker from $450 per ton to $550 per ton. On slide 18, we turn to Logistics & Services, where revenue growth of 21% in the first quarter was again driven primarily by the acquisitions we consolidated over the course of 2022. This led to 30% higher inorganic revenue and a 9% decline in organic revenue. In contrast to our Q4 results, where our top 200 customers still provided us with positive organic revenue growth, in Q1, they did decline as they were also affected by the destocking, but to a lesser extent as volumes were partially compensated by new wins.
As our business is strongly exposed to retail and consumer goods, future development will depend on consumer and retailer behavior, so we are watching those trends carefully. The lower revenue led to a corresponding decline in EBIT to $135 million and an EBIT margin of 3.9%, slightly above the previous quarter, but clearly below previous year. This profitability was in line with our expectation, and we will actively monitor the volume development to adapt the cost structure proactively in the coming months. Taking a look at the detail of Logistics & Services on slide 20, similar to our results in Q4, the lower volumes were visible in all of our by Maersk product families.
In Managed by Maersk, higher demand for booking services in our lead logistics activities helped to offset lower volumes from existing customers in supply chain management. In addition, our cold chain logistics activities grew organically, and our project logistics business benefited from the integration of the Martin Bencher acquisition. Under Fulfilled by Maersk, we see the effect of inventory correction in lower contract logistics and e-commerce volumes, which led to overall lower organic revenues. Yet these were offset on a reported basis by the consolidation of LF Logistics and Pilot. In Transported by Maersk, we continue to see lower volumes in both air and LCL, and this quarter we also felt the impact of lower air rates. This was offset by the consolidation of Senator International, so that reported revenues were flat for the quarter. As we expected after the Q4 2022, Q1 was another tough quarter.
As Vincent mentioned earlier, given our acquisitions and therefore our strong geographical presence in North America, we are exposed to the US retail and consumer goods sectors which seem to be the hardest hit at present. Based on purchase orders that we see through our 4PL activities, we do not yet observe a consistent pickup of volumes trending into the Q2. Although we do still anticipate a recovery of volumes in the second half of the year, the timing is not yet clear. On slide 20, we turn to terminals where the effect of lower volumes is also visible. As we mentioned earlier, the release of port congestions was essentially complete by late last year, and therefore we have seen a decline in both revenues and profitability due primarily to lower congestions related storage income, but also lower volumes.
From a geographic perspective, it was North America that drove the majority of the decline as we saw 27% lower volumes at our terminals there, and this is also where we saw the highest levels of port congestions last year. The comparison base in terms of profitability is of course, still distorted by the $485 million impairment that we took last year on our Global Ports Investments PLC in conjunctions we are exit from China, from Russia. Adjusted for that, we can see an approximately 50% decline in profitability.
That said, when we compare to pre-pandemic volumes, going back to Q1 2019 for example, we see that overall volumes are down less than 1%, at the time our EBIT is up $54 million or 35%, which underscores how far terminals has come in improving profitability. This is clearly visible in the 11.9% ROIC well in excess of our 9% target. Let's look at the components by turning to slide 21. Here we can see the volume effect, which was primarily driven by North American import volumes. The biggest drop was in revenue per move effect, which is where the lower storage income makes itself felt.
This was partially offset by CPI related tariffs increase. At the same time, terminals also brought down cost per move by 3.4%, demonstrating their ability to compensate for lower volumes. Sequentially, cost per move was down 8% when compared to Q4 2022. Underlying margins are quite protected by the combination of tariff increase and cost reductions. To finish up on slide 22, we turn to Towage and Maritime Services. The most significant announcement here was the planned divestiture of Maersk Supply Service to A.P. Moller Holding, our parent company. This marks the completion of our decision to divest all energy related activities and the transaction is expected to close during Q2.
In the Q1 we saw good performance in most of the TMS segment and in particular in Svitzer, while the market environment for MCI remains challenging given the low container demand. Following our segment review, I would like to hand over to the operator for the Q&A session.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin the question- and- answer session. At this time, please limit yourself to one question only. If you have further questions, please rejoin the queue. The first question comes from the line of Alexia Dogani with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Vincent, in the morning on the Bloomberg interview, you indicated that you're working towards regaining your unit cost to 2018 and 2019 levels. Can you kind of give us the building blocks to get there, and how long would it take you to get there? Thanks.
Hi, Alexia. I think what we're trying to do now is really to roll back as much of the inflationary pressure as we have seen, and we need to take a benchmark that is 18 or 19 to see what it was before that. It's improbable that we can roll it all the way back down to those level, but that's a bit the challenge that we're taking on, and we'll have to see how far we can bring it down. We still are facing some inflationary pressure, but we're also seeing more and more levers where that we can act on. We talked about slow steaming.
This is something we're implementing across the network right now, and it has a significant impact on both our fuel bill, but also our emissions. The second one is also on managing capacity proactively so through blanking sailings and making sure we adjust our network to the size of the demand and not sail with low utilization. Finally, there is a lot of work that needs to be done on the procurement side, because we're seeing as the market lines up, that we will see the charter market come back down. We see also that congestions on the land side means that a lot of the prices that did increase during the pandemic, they will face now deflationary pressure in the next couple of years.
Whereas it's a bit too early for us to give a precise goal of where we think we can take it, because the work is ongoing to try to determine this, I think we've given ourselves the challenge to aim high and really take some of the hard decisions that will be necessary to roll this, as much of this, back as possible.
The next question comes from the line of Cristian Nedelcu with UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much for taking my question. It's about the ocean profitability in the second half of the year. Just doing some ballpark math here, I think the CCFI is currently around 20% higher than the 2019 levels. If you translate this into average freight rates, that would be somewhere around $350 higher rate than in 2019. In the same time, the bunker cost per container is around $100 higher than 2019, and your unit cost ex bunker are around $500 higher than 2019. I guess where I'm going with this, my ballpark estimates here would suggest that second half EBITDA in ocean, the run rate should be somewhere around 0, and implicitly your EBIT should be negative.
Just checking if I'm missing any important points in my calculations or if I'm too skeptical here? Thank you.
Well, thanks very much for your question. I think directionally, clearly we have guided that the Q1 here was the strongest, and that counts for ocean, and we will see a regression of profitability as the new contracts come in. They are, as we also said, tending towards shipment rates, right? Now they are approaching obviously a little bit the spot rates on from the higher side, right? We expect that contracts will always be a little bit higher than the actual spot as a first element to your bridge. Second, as Vincent was saying, we're also working on costs.
We will not guide on the, on the actual numbers, but clearly our guidance that we have given for the year and we reconfirm today implies a much lower profitability in Q3, Q4. We'll see where exactly we land depending on as well the market rates and the spot development in the second half.
The next question comes from the line of Robert Joynson with BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everybody. Just one question on the free cash flow guidance which you've left unchanged at at least $2 billion. Given that you produced over $4 billion in Q1, I think some people are interpreting the unchanged guidance as an implied negative free cash flow for the remainder of the year. Could you maybe just provide some color around that? Do you expect free cash flow to be negative during the final three quarters, or is maybe that too pessimistic? Thank you.
No, clearly I was a bit in the link on the previous question that we clearly have seen the peak as well in sort of free cash flow generation, right? That is clear we shouldn't expect to have this effect of quite a still strong EBITDA and a reversal of working capital per due over the next quarters. The reversal of working capital will abate, or it has probably abated. And then it's back to what is the EBITDA generation in the last few quarters, combined with higher CapEx, right? When we talk about free cash flow, you've seen that the CapEx have been fairly small, or restrained in the first quarter compared to our yearly guidance.
You'll have, on the one hand, a lower cash flow generation, no working capital contribution, in rough terms, and higher CapEx, which, on the free cash flow generation clearly indicates that the next quarters, particularly the second half, will be much, much lower. That'll explain why we keep the guidance. The guidance actually being above, right? We will be above, and then we'll see how much. Clearly from the cash generation and from the profitability, we have passed the peak of the year.
The next question comes from the line of Sathish Sivakumar with Citi. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. My question is actually on the volume exposure. If you had to put it roughly in two broad buckets
What is your exposure to, say, verticals that are exposed to consumers like retailers compared to industrial type goods like machinery? Just related to that actually, how does the inventory levels compare on those two broad category levels? Yeah. Thank you.
I think it's a bit different across the segments. Because we have a very high, or much higher market share in our ocean segment than we have in the logistics segment, you could say that our exposure in ocean is much more even to what happens in the global economy. Whereas, in our logistics business there, it's much more related to retail, to FMCG and to lifestyle verticals and technology. Those are verticals that are... I would say our logistics part is much heavier exposed to the consumer consumption, so end products, than what you see in our shipping business.
That's why also what you see in both Q4 numbers and Q1 is that actually the impact on growth across the logistics segment is being felt actually quite pronounced because the wins that we continue to implement, they come in slowly. And the adjustment comes in at once. So you can't just ride it out under the growth. What we have also is, especially in the destocking that is currently taking place, is especially affecting North America more than Europe. That you see also come through in the terminal results because our two largest facility in Los Angeles and in Newark, they actually also feel the fact that there is just simply fewer volumes coming through the pipeline.
These are circumstances that are temporary in nature. Whether they're gonna last 7 months, 8 months, 10 months, that's the part that... Or a few more. That's the part that is really hard for us to predict. As Patrick was saying before, we don't have clear data so far from our 4PL that this is coming to an end right away. It is going to because we can clearly see that the level of adjustments that there has been and what is coming through is significantly below what the macro would indicate. Consumption now is well ahead of what is being moved. It's the inventory that takes the difference.
The next question comes from the line of Sam Bland with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. It's around recent transpacific rates. We've seen quite a sharp bounce there over the last month or so. Can you just talk about what you think that might be driven by and whether it's had much of an effect on contract negotiations on that lane, you know, versus what you might have expected a couple of months ago. Thank you.
Yeah. Indeed, there's been quite a bounce actually because the this destocking that we just talked about actually has affected the U.S. more. We saw the rate decrease faster there, and there's been a bounce back now because actually this it looks like things are firming up a little bit, which is positive. It doesn't really affect the contract rates in this case because actually you go through different rounds of the tenders and the offers are actually put in front of the customer a little bit earlier. Anyway a bit higher than what the prevailing spot level that you have. This does not really impact the contract rates which actually closed on the Pacific pretty much as we expected.
It is a positive with respect to seeing the market, a market that actually reacts rationally to the fact that once the destocking start to stabilize, then we see the price gradually recover.
The next question comes from the line of Michael Vitfell-Rasmussen with Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Could you just add a few comments in terms of what you see in the competition doing out here? This is mainly on the ocean side. Are they being as rational as you guys are being? Are they slow steaming as much and basically having the same approach towards the customers? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks. That's a great point to make here. Actually, this stabilization of rates that you see take place here in the first quarter, it could not be possible if it was only Maersk that was behaving in a rational way. We've seen actually significant blanking activities across all alliances, as they're faced with a lot less demand and have had inflationary pressure in their cost base as well in the last couple of years. There is a need to revert to cost containment and protect utilization. We've seen that happen across the different trades.
We've seen a fairly rational or more rational behaviors, and that is evidenced by the fact that if you look at the down cycles in connection with the financial crisis in 2008, 2009 or in connection with 2015, 2016, the market as it adjusted down, went all the way down and then had to kinda rebound to find a balance. In this case, what has happened is the market went down but found a balance without having to go and hit all the way to the bottom and then recover a little bit after a few months. I think we see definitely better conduct and more rationality in how this is being handled so far.
The part that I want to keep though, because it goes back to the supply side risk that we talk about in our guidance, is that at the operational level, it seems that there is a lot more rationality. On the ordering level, there is still a concern for us to see the level of ordering and what needs to phase into 2023 and 2024, which means that there are still some risks about how we're going to see this phased in in the coming quarters.
The next question comes from the line of Ulrik Bak with SEB. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello, thank you for taking my question. Can you perhaps talk about the different cost items in Ocean and where we saw double-digit declines this quarter year with you? How much of this is related to the volume decline and perhaps other measures that you may have taken? To what extent can these cost improvements be extrapolated to the coming quarters? Thanks.
I'm sorry. The line was really bad. I must admit I did not understand the question. Can you try to take it again?
Sure. I have a different line here.
Okay.
Yes. Yeah. Can you perhaps talk a bit about the different cost items in Ocean where we saw double-digit declines during the quarter? How much is related to volume decline and other measures that you may have taken? Also to what extent can these cost improvements be extrapolated to the coming quarters? Thanks.
Yeah. Maybe just to start on your side here. Effectively, we have seen a good development here on the cost side. I think the main element which contributed in Q1 to a good cost element was the slow steaming, which clearly had the impact of reducing our consumption by 11%, so quite a substantial amount and more than offset the 3% increase in bunker price we saw. That was the single most important item. We had still a bit of revenue recognition coming in, a same effect as we had in the working capital. As the business is coming down, it helped a little bit.
Interestingly then more when you look forward, we had some of the behavioral costs coming back in terms of terminal costs, in terms of container repositioning, given that the congestions has reduced. That we expect those costs to also come back in the next quarters.
The next question comes from the line of Dan Togo Jensen with Carnegie Investment Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Maybe looking a bit at logistics and the top 200 clients here for motions. Can you give some color on the churn here among these top 200? How many are the same now compared to 2019? And also in more maybe in absolute terms, or in relative terms, if you can do that, how much of revenue in logistics today comes from these top 200, and how much was it, let's say one, two years ago? I mean, they are growing more than the rest of the clients in logistics, and they're also falling less, as we can see here in this quarter. And maybe some color on the incremental margin on this growth from these top 200 when it returns, what we can expect. Thanks.
By and large, these 200 customers are pretty much the same. They may have had three or four or five of them that have changed and evolved as we move, but they reflect our key client and runway program across the company, and it is pretty much the same benchmark. The growth is not a factor of churn. We've not lost any customer actually in the last three years and continue to grow with most of them at quite a significant pace. As you rightfully say, if you look at all the last few quarters, you will see actually that their growth is faster than the average. Their share of the business is actually increasing.
That's actually the focus that we have right now because we clearly it is the larger companies that tend to choose to work with direct asset providers and so on. Some of the SMEs are more geared towards the freight forwarder business model. We're focusing on the customers that appreciate the direct relationship with asset providers and grow up our business through working with them.
The next question comes from the line of Lars Heindorff with Nordea. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Also a question for my part on the Logistics and Services. It's regarding air cargo. We've seen ocean rates coming down, but we also see now air cargo rates trending actually quite significant downwards. If I understand it correctly, you have around about 22 aircraft in your portfolio, of which 4-5 is parked. I just want to get a sense for how much of the total logistics business is that air cargo, and also, how many airplanes are you still taking on, or do you have more in your order book yet to come?
Yeah. Maybe just to start on the answer here. Overall, we report our air business in Transported by Maersk. To your question, the proportion, it is fairly small within Transported by Maersk. The main element here is our intermodal, so the containers, drayage and so on, the land side of our ocean transportation. That is the main element here on the Transported by Maersk. The activities per se have a different split. We
Our own planes are probably the smallest part of the business. We do have indeed probably around 20 planes. Most of them are actually and you know, as we have had for many, many years, under contract for UPS and DHL and so on, so are not reported in our numbers. We just have a wait list of those aircraft. We use a few aircraft currently on our own. We'll have 3 coming up next year. From the total air activity, what is more important is the part from Senator, which is a contracted capacity, not own planes, but actually reserved, which we can also release and expand according to demand. Then we obviously have a part on belly space.
We're not totally dependent on our own planes, which actually represent the smallest part of our air business.
If I can just add one comment. I think it's fair to say that the normalization has taken place also in air freight. That's also what you were into, Lars. We see air freight as being actually more volatile, which means, as Patrick is saying, that there we will continue to rely on procuring capacity in different, in different ways so that we have a lot more flexibility there than we have in ocean. We see this as being very unnecessary. We're gonna keep moving on own airplane to a small part of what we do. But there are customers for whom this is a necessity and we will continue to be able to support them.
There is also a lot of areas where we will not rely on our own capacity and will continue to grow through, you know, mechanisms that are similar to what other 3PL are using and using really the belly space of the airlines.
The next question comes from the line of Muneeba Kayani with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to understand, in your view, do you think the industry at these levels is loss-making at these spot rate levels? How does that factor into how you think about capacity discipline in the second half of the year and if there is a demand rebound? Thank you.
If you look at the guidance that we provided and take out what we have delivered this quarter, then I think as we were into also in one of the previous questions, at these levels, the industry is certainly not creating economic profit. In many cases, it depends a bit on your geographic exposure and your contract exposure and so on, but you are either in a black or a pink or a more, maybe more red breakeven depending on what type of exposure you have. If you're very exposed to the spot, you may actually be.
Very exposed to East-West, you may actually be in loss-giving territory and for different, may have slightly different exposures and could still be in black. I think what this shows is the real necessity to protect earnings, to really have a very disciplined approach to capacity and cost in general. I think some of the cost savings that we have seen here in the first quarter, there are still more legs to it in the coming quarters, so we can affect actually and bring the break-even point further down. There is also some work that needs to happen on making sure that we do maintain a higher capacity utilization.
I think our capacity utilization here in the first quarter was 88%, which is not a bad number. In a strong market, we're usually able to push that up to 91%-92%. That makes actually a big difference on the network that we have in here. As the volume recover, you know, we can gain 3%, 4% on the utilization, and that will certainly help also move the break-even point. We have the levers to actually handle this normalization in a rational and good way, even if it's a bit difficult. You know, you can you have seen in the past some irrational behaviors. We've not seen them...
We've not seen so much of it in this time. Let's see in the second part of the year whether they happen or not. I think for us, our expectation right now is that people will be rational. That's what we'll continue also to execute on our side.
The next question comes from the line of Anders-Redigh Karlsen with Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes, good afternoon. My question goes on fleet growth and capacity. If you could share some thoughts around, you know, the order book. Are you seeing any delays? Are you seeing any regulatory effects on the existing fleet? Are you also seeing some, you know, exits from fleet in total by scrapping?
Yeah. From the order book, I think that, you know, in essence, any type of delays out of the yard is not going to have material impact on the outlook because, you're typically able to negotiate something between 1 to 4 months, delay, which here, if you look at the size of the order book, is not gonna make a big difference whether it comes, it comes a couple of months before or after. That I think is the first thing. The delivery windows, the way that they are may move a little bit, but it's not something that should materially affect the outcome. What we see, though, is the implementation of the CII regulation, the...
Also of the ETS with the EU, that will have an impact that is still hard to quantify on capacity depending on how this is being implemented and how this is being enforced. That could have certainly some positive impact on absorbing some of the capacity that is coming online. The next step is also which you are into is the scrapping. There has been virtually nothing scrapped here in the last couple of years. We should see that normalize and come back to maybe at least close to what the yard capacity is because there is demand for this right now.
I don't think that we have seen yet this activity pick up to the level that we will following the normalization. It also has to do that, you know, if you just look at the result of the quarter, it was still rational to deploy the storage for during the first quarter because the prices were still profitable enough that you would keep pretty much anything that you can sailing. I think as we get into the reality we talked about in some of the previous questions of the second half year, you will see a gradual increase in scrapping, which will also have some type of positive impact. That being said, you add this all up, it still requires a fair amount of discipline and a continued rationality.
What we have seen in the last 6 months from the different carriers and alliances, you need, you will need to continue it to see it so to avoid another downturn.
We have a follow-up question from Alexia Dogani with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking the follow-up. Just, Vincent, again, kind of going back to your opening remarks around the changes that we should expect in 2025. I think you talked about more modular services, increased flexibility, better stability. Can you kind of explain a bit more what you were implying? Obviously, you know, that could be a comment attached to the alliance benefits, but clearly it is in relation to the alliance breakup. Can you just explain what your network strategy is going to be post 2025 and this modularity comment, please? Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you, Alexia. That's a pretty broad topic, so I'm gonna try to give you the pixie version of this. I think basically, what there is in here is that for us, since the inception of the alliances, actually the scale benefits that we were able to get through the alliances have basically gone away. We've grown organically to a size where we today can deploy effectively alone what an alliance could needed to do together about eight years ago. What the alliance have given us is scale economics, which is basically the ability to deploy 22, 20-plus thousand TEU ships effectively and reduce unit cost. What it has not given is modularity, flexibility, and so on.
Because you actually are up still in having basically in a way, the disadvantage of being an asset provider by having a heavy balance sheet, but the disadvantage of being a 3PL by having half of your customer promises actually riding on somebody else's ship and being a bit at the mercy of the operating decisions that they're making. Same in reverse for your partners. I think for us, what is really key now is that we regain the operational control so that we can turn assets into choice for our customers and make a play for quality.
From that, I think we will talk in due time about exactly how that looks like operationally, but we do believe that we can actually create a network that is where we can increase asset intensity. More, we will need less capacity to move the same amount of volumes. Or the asset turn, sorry. We can increase the asset turn, less capacity to move the same amount of volumes, less carbon footprint, more reliability, and also very competitive transit time. I think we cannot do that today in an alliance setup. We will do that once we get out of the alliance and have the implementation of our unique network, and that's one of the proof points that I talked about for 2025.
Another follow-up question from the line of Cristian Nedelcu with UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking the follow-up. Just a question on Q2 Ocean. Patrick, you mentioned that the benefit from prior contract rates that will persist also in Q2. I guess my question, could you give us a bit of color, how this benefit would look versus the Q1 benefit? Is it similar, is it slightly below, or is it half of what you saw in Q1? Any type of color there. In relation to this and your prior comments on striving to further improve unit cost development, how should we think at Q2 unit cost in Ocean sequentially? Thank you.
Thanks for your follow-up. Obviously, we do not guide on the quarter, right? I'll be more broad in my answer. Clearly, I think as you know, the contract renewals happen in Q1 and Q2, right? The Q1 is very much marked still by contract levels of the previous year and the ones we just had done in Q4 2022, which were at a different level. When you look into Q2, you actually have quite a lot of the volumes which are already then at rebased at a new level because a lot of things have been based in or signed in Q1.
It's still a dynamic quarter in itself because there's the whole U.S. season and so on being signed during the quarter itself, typically by first of May. It's an evolving quarter in terms of freight rates. As we discussed early on, the tendency is for contract rates to tend towards spot, which means that new contract rates are lower than previous contract rates, which means there's a direct impact on the EBIT of ocean. Clearly, I would say expect a further reduction, which is totally in line with our guidance. And on the cost side, I think we will continue obviously, the elements that we have started. Slow steaming will continue.
We are, as Vincent was highlighting early on, looking at the costs and having a few leads to reduce costs further. That will be a progressive development over the next few quarters. I would expect a good and decent development of our costs in the second quarter. It's a multi-quarter, multi-year effort to bring down and roll back inflation into our cost position as well.
Another follow-up from the line of Lars Heindorff with Nordea. Please go ahead.
Just a housekeeping question that's on the revenue side in ocean. maybe I'm not forecasting a significant different from many others. I have what I call box revenue, which is basically rate times multiplied with the volume. Then I have other revenue. Other revenue still continue to be quite high as we enter into this. I would have thought it would have declined more with a normalization in the ocean market and the demurrage and detention declining. Are there any impact from MOT or any other explanation why this part of revenue is still so high?
I think you are right with the direction. Clearly it is declining progressively. I think if you, if you look also on a quarterly level, it is coming down. We would expect this as well to continue to come down in Q2. The MOT effect was only marginal in the first quarter. It was positive, but it was marginal. For directionally, you're right that this position comes down as demurrage charges also come down.
Another follow-up from the line of Robert Joynson with BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Mr. Joynson, your line's...
Apologies everyone, I was on mute. I just a follow-up question on contract rates, but specifically on the 1.8 million FFE that are on multi-year contracts. Are those rates similar to the contracts agreed so far this year, or are they materially higher or lower? Any color there would be great. Thank you.
Yeah. These contracts are. They have their own mechanism to adjust and they follow basically this indexing that we have agreed with the customer. Right now they are actually higher than what they otherwise is. They were also lower, I gotta say, in 21 and 22 than what we otherwise could have gotten. Now it's a bit the other way. They will converge over time with the rest of the contracts. Especially if you think about 2024, you know, they will gradually get into in line with what the new reality is.
Here in 2023, they provide us some nice and welcome cushion for the adjustment that is taking place.
This concludes our Q&A session, and I hand back to Vincent Clerc.
Okay. Thank you very much, and thank you everybody for participating. In closing, I would like to leave you with the following final remarks. Despite all the challenges of low import volumes and inventory corrections, the organization and all the Maersk colleagues around the globe have pulled together to produce a very solid and strong Q1 results. After the past couple of years, which were heavily affected by the pandemic, this transition to a new normal is progressing in line with our expectations. We therefore maintain our guidance of $8 billion-$11 billion EBITDA and at least $2 billion free cash flow. This new trading environment we find ourselves in provides the impetus for us to continue transforming A.P. Moller - Maersk into the global integrator of container logistics.
Our customers demand it. Many of the challenges that has affected their global supply chains over the past couple of years may have temporarily abated, they still remain unresolved. Through our strategy, we have the potential to solve for them and be able to protect our customers better when new disruptions will occur. Therein lies a great growth opportunity and more favorable shareholder return profile, this is ultimately what truly integrated logistics is really about. At the same time, this environment also enhances the necessity to manage our cost base with urgency, to roll back some of the inflationary pressure we have felt over the past couple of years and realize productivity gains from the digitization efforts and from the growth that we have realized.
Time and again, our Maersk colleagues have demonstrated their ability to pull through challenging times and these pivotal moments and to deliver strong progression by focusing on the right priorities. I am very confident in our ability to do just that this time around as well. That is it. Thank you, folks.