Resilience of Global Container Shipping Firms to the Red Sea Crisis: Comparative Evidence from Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd Based on Quarterly Data

Due to the Red Sea crisis, international container shipping must now go around the Cape of Good Hope and take a longer route instead of using the Suez Canal. The increased distance of travel for the ship will reduce it carrying capacity and lower freight rates. This paper conducts a comparative case study of the resilience of Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd based on quarterly company-level data. Revenue, EBITDA, transport volume, EBITDA margin, and volume growth from Q1 2022 to Q2 2026 will be analyzed. Difference-in-differences and regression analysis are employed to examine the impact of the disruption on financial and operating performance. According to the above results, both companies exhibited relatively large-scale transportation activities after the disruption, but had different paths for financial recovery. The estimated difference-in-differences for EBITDA margin is about 6.33 percentage points when 2023 Q1-Q3 is used as the pre-crisis period and 2024 Q1-Q2 is employed as the post-crisis period. At present, only the previous analysis is available; a causal interpretation cannot be made without a control group. The regression results also show that the connection between the post-crisis indicator and EBITDA margin is statistically significant, but there is no statistical difference in the connection with volume growth. The attributes of heterogeneity in cross-case comparison include differences in business structure and freight-rate exposure, as well as various degrees of network flexibility and customer-oriented service management.