Maersk Q2 2026: EBITDA Guidance More Than Doubles and Free Cash Flow Still Guides to Zero
The headline everyone will carry is the 7% move and the beat: underlying EBITDA of $3.0bn for the second quarter against a company-compiled consensus of $2.12bn, revenue up 20% year-on-year to $15.8bn, EBIT of $1.6bn versus $845m, group EBIT margin at 10.0%. The number that actually describes the year is buried in the guidance table. Maersk has now raised full-year underlying EBITDA three times — $4.5-7bn on 7 May, $8-10bn on 29 June, $10.5-12.5bn today. Free cash flow guidance has travelled from “at least negative $3bn” to “at least negative $1.5bn” to “greater than zero.” Capex sat unchanged at $10-11bn through all three revisions. An earnings guide that has roughly doubled in three months converts into a free cash flow guide that only just clears the zero line.
That gap is the whole story, and it points in two directions at once.
Start with where the earnings came from, because the company’s own sensitivity disclosure settles the argument. A $100 per FFE change in container freight rate moves full-year EBIT by $700m. A 100,000 FFE change in volume moves it by $10m. Rate is seventy times more powerful than volume, unit for unit. Ocean loaded volumes grew 4.1% in the quarter; the average loaded freight rate grew 22%. Ocean EBIT went from $229m a year ago to $935m, and from negative $192m in the first quarter to positive $935m in the second — an $1.13bn sequential swing on essentially unchanged capacity and 96% vessel utilisation, with unit cost at fixed bunker actually down 0.8%. Vincent Clerc spent the morning talking about the resilience of demand and volumes continuing unabated. The demand is real and the volumes did continue. They are not what produced the quarter. Rerouting around a disrupted Strait of Hormuz, port congestion in Europe, the Middle East, the east coast of South America and West Africa, and the resulting tightness in effective capacity produced the quarter. Maersk is being paid for scarcity of slots, not abundance of cargo.
This matters because scarcity of slots is the one input the company cannot forecast and does not control, and because the sensitivity runs symmetrically. Working backwards, the EBIT guidance midpoint moved from roughly $3bn in June to $5.5bn today — about $350 per FFE of rate, annualised. A normalisation of Red Sea and Gulf routing would release the capacity currently absorbed by longer voyages around Africa faster than any orderbook could. Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have already announced partial Suez returns. Roughly $785 per FFE of rate erosion takes the guided EBIT midpoint to zero.
The more durable finding is in the two segments nobody will lead with. Terminals grew revenue 11%, with revenue per move up 7.1% and volumes up 2.2%, and delivered EBIT of $458m against $461m a year earlier. An eleven percent revenue gain produced a small earnings decline, because the Middle East conflict absorbed all of it. Logistics & Services grew revenue 15% and lifted EBIT to $217m from $175m at a 5.1% margin, and the company is explicit that landside led, supported by landbridge solutions connecting ports across the Gulf region — trucking and inland routing around the blockage. The same event that flat-lined the terminal business created a new revenue line in the logistics business and repriced the ocean business upward. That netting is the competitive advantage, and it is not the Gemini network, which is a scheduling architecture any two carriers with sufficient tonnage can copy and which Hapag-Lloyd co-owns anyway. The advantage is owning the ocean leg, the box, the quay and the truck simultaneously, so that a disruption which destroys margin in one layer is monetised in another. A pure carrier captured the rate. Only an integrated operator captured the landbridge. Whether that advantage survives normalisation is a separate question — in a calm market the integrated structure is mostly overhead — but it is what the quarter demonstrates.
Capital discipline is the second structural signal, and it is arguably the more important one for anyone underwriting 2027. The industry’s response to the 2021-22 rate spike was an orderbook that destroyed the following three years. This time Maersk has taken $6bn onto the EBITDA guide since May and left capex at $10-11bn for both rolling two-year windows, kept the buyback at $1.0bn, and put the incremental cash into terminals with long asset lives — $350m at Suape in Brazil, over $1.7bn committed at Lien Chieu in Vietnam. That is a management team treating the upcycle as transitory in rate and permanent in bottleneck. It is also why free cash flow guides to approximately zero on $10.5-12.5bn of EBITDA: the capex line, working capital on higher bunker prices, and lease obligations consume essentially the entire cyclical windfall. Shareholders are not receiving this cycle in cash. They are receiving it in terminal concessions.
The stock reflects a market that has stopped believing the downgrade cycle. Shares traded around DKK 18,715 in the morning session, up about 7.5% from a DKK 17,405 close, against a 52-week range of DKK 11,840 to 18,920 — roughly 58% off the low and effectively at the top of the range, on a market capitalisation near DKK 270bn. Consensus twelve-month targets sit between DKK 13,400 and 14,500, with eleven sell ratings against one buy. Sell-side price targets have been wrong for the entire year and the dispersion is enormous — low estimates near DKK 8,000, highs above DKK 19,000 — which is what happens when a cohort is modelled on mid-cycle rate reversion that keeps failing to arrive. On trailing earnings the stock is near 27 times. On the guided EBIT midpoint it is high single digits. That spread is not a valuation argument in either direction; it is the market’s standard treatment of a cyclical peak, and it has been the correct treatment often enough that dismissing it requires an argument about why this bottleneck is structural rather than episodic.
Base case: rates hold through the third-quarter peak season, the company lands mid-guide at $5.5bn EBIT, free cash flow turns modestly positive, and the shares hold a DKK 16,000-19,000 band while the multiple stays compressed. Bull case requires two things — Gulf and Red Sea disruption persisting into 2027 alongside continued landside congestion, and management converting the windfall into a buyback materially above $1.0bn — which would support DKK 21,000-23,000 and force the sell side into a second capitulation. Bear case is not a Maersk-specific failure; it is a cohort derating. Hormuz and Suez normalise, round-Africa routing releases effective capacity back into the market within a single quarter, rates give back the $350 per FFE that built the guidance raise, and container shipping trades back to trough book multiples across Hapag-Lloyd, ZIM, COSCO and HMM together. DKK 10,000-12,000 is the zone, which is roughly where the low analyst targets already sit.
The decision-relevant number in the third-quarter report is not volume growth, not the container market’s 4% expansion, and not the EBITDA line. It is the average loaded freight rate per FFE in Ocean. A $100 move there is worth $700m of EBIT. An entire 100,000 FFE swing in volume is worth $10m.