Maersk's seven-pointed star began as a sea captain's prayer
The white star on Maersk's pale blue containers has a tender origin. In 1886 Captain Peter Mærsk Møller's wife Anna fell gravely ill on a voyage. He prayed for a star to appear in an overcast sky, and afterwards painted one on the funnel of his steamer, the Laura, as a reminder that his prayer was heard.
The captain explained it in a letter to Anna in October 1886, and the emblem outlived him by a long way. When he and his son Arnold Peter Møller founded the Svendborg Steamship Company in April 1904, the star on blue became its funnel mark and house flag. The Danish designer Acton Bjørn modernised it in 1973, and that version still flies today. The shade even acquired a name, Maersk blue.
The business stayed in the family. A. P. Møller's son, Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, became a partner in 1939, took over when his father died, and stayed chairman until December 2003, when he was 90. The company, now based in Copenhagen, remains publicly traded but controlled by the Møller family through holding companies. In 2025 it earned 53.9 billion dollars in revenue with more than 108,000 staff.
For decades it was a sprawling conglomerate. Maersk Oil, founded in 1962 after winning North Sea drilling rights, brought in 68 percent of group profit in 2008. In 2016 the company chose to concentrate on container logistics; it sold the oil arm to Total, spun off its drilling business and later floated its towage unit, Svitzer.
Containers are where it made its name. In 2006 it took delivery of the Emma Maersk, then the largest container ship in the world, and in 2011 ordered the even bigger Triple E class, each carrying 18,000 containers. In 2021 it held 17 percent of global container capacity, the largest fleet. It has also become a test bed for cleaner shipping, unveiling the methanol-fuelled feeder ship Laura Mærsk on the Baltic in 2023. Not everything has gone smoothly: the NotPetya malware attack in 2017 disrupted its operations for months.
Source: Maersk
