Maersk has spent more than $3 billion digitizing its transshipment hubs and cutting transload times in half, and the investment anchors a North American land network the company says now makes it a material domestic logistics player rather than purely an ocean carrier.

The figures behind that claim are concrete. Maersk Ground Freight operates approximately 470 owned or leased trucks, more than 4,000 owned trailer assets, seven linehaul hubs, 58 stations across the U.S. and an agency network of roughly 140 locations. Its e-commerce arm handles about 5 million home deliveries per year, focused on big and bulky items such as sofas and refrigerators, and integrates with Maersk Contract Logistics and Maersk Air Freight.

"When I look at our setup here, we're now a material player in the domestic space in North America, actually across supply chains," Maersk President of North America Ditlev Blicher told Supply Chain Dive in an interview.

Acquisition-led buildout

The pivot traces to 2021, when CEO Vincent Clerc — then leading the strategy — said Maersk aimed to shift its network away from port-side flow logistics toward omnichannel fulfillment and e-commerce. The vehicle was the 2020 acquisition of Performance Team, which at the time ran 24 warehousing sites totaling about 800,000 square meters, a footprint expected to double Maersk's warehousing and distribution capacity.

Maersk followed with the 2022 acquisition of LF Logistics in Asia, deepening its omnichannel fulfillment expertise for global e-commerce markets. In 2024 it opened a fulfillment center in Groveport, Ohio, serving Levi Strauss & Co.'s wholesale, retail and e-commerce channels from a single operation — designed to improve on-time performance, cut container handling time and raise throughput. In July, Maersk announced a new fulfillment hub in Hopedale, Massachusetts, to support a major e-commerce customer it declined to name.

For distributors and retailers, the appeal of the integrated model is inventory economics: wholesale, retail and e-commerce stock sit in one pool. Wholesalers typically need palletized warehouse operations while e-commerce brands require piece-level sorting; Blicher says a single omnichannel model eliminates duplicated infrastructure, multiple systems and unnecessary transload disruptions.

Maersk is not chasing a one-stop-shop positioning, Blicher said. The goal is owning enough adjacent capabilities to remove waste from the chain — a claim distributors should weigh against the disclosed asset base rather than take at face value.

The transload fix and hub-and-spoke

The operational centerpiece is what Maersk calls the transload problem. "Every time you had to shift a container from one vessel to another in a hub, it would take at best a week," Blicher said. The $3 billion-plus program digitized the hubs and expanded their operational capability, enabling Maersk to move its East-West trades from a string principle — vessels calling port to port in sequence — to hub and spoke.

The hub-and-spoke structure operates in the Gemini Cooperation, Maersk's ocean alliance with Hapag-Lloyd, with two or three vessel calls each at origin and destination. That redundancy gives shippers options when a port disruption hits.

"If you are port number three out of a string of 22, you know that if something happens there, you have a choice," Blicher said. "If there's a delay, either you have a domino effect all the way through or you say I'm going to have to catch up, so I'm going to omit the next port."

Since the model took effect in May of last year, schedule reliability has held at around 90% or above for the most part, per Blicher, and transload times have been cut in half. Those are company-reported figures, not independently audited, but the 90% reliability benchmark is a measurable claim shippers can track against carrier schedule data.

"We're in a great space right now. We're nowhere near done, but we're a scalable player in the market, and it's resonating really, really great with the fantastic clients that we have in North America," Blicher said. With the Massachusetts hub pending and the Gemini network maturing, Maersk's land-side expansion in the U.S. remains a live buildout rather than a finished platform.