Container shipping's alliance map changed materially in early 2025 and has held through 2026. The 2M partnership between Maersk and MSC dissolved after a decade of operation. In its place, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd formed Gemini Cooperation, built specifically around schedule reliability rather than simply pooling capacity. MSC now operates independently and remains the largest single carrier by capacity.
Hapag-Lloyd's departure from the old THE Alliance left ONE, HMM and Yang Ming to regroup as the Premier Alliance, a smaller grouping offering more targeted direct-port services. The Ocean Alliance — CMA CGM, COSCO, Evergreen and OOCL — kept its membership unchanged and renewed its cooperation agreement through 2032, which makes it the most structurally stable of the three.
Why this matters to a shipper: which alliance operates a given service affects port rotation, transit time and, to some degree, schedule reliability, since the three groupings have taken different approaches — Gemini has explicitly prioritized punctuality as its selling point, for instance. A carrier or route that worked well under the old alliance structure may now sit in a different grouping with a different rotation.
We track which alliance and loop a given booking actually runs under, since the vessel-sharing agreement behind a sailing affects more than just which logo is on the container — it affects realistic transit time and connection reliability for that specific routing.