How can you make sure your business has a positive impact if your profits mostly come from activities that damage the planet? One good answer comes from shipping giant Maersk. I spoke to the company’s former chairman, Jim Snabe, following a Fortune Connect event this week.
The recent headlines coming from the Danish multinational are impressive—whether you care about profits or purpose. In its annual report released in February, Maersk announced a record year for revenues and profits. And by this summer, the company’s (and the world’s) first-ever carbon-neutral vessel should hit the water in South Korea, while the port of Shanghai will bunker its green fuel.
Back in 2016, though, the largest shipping company in the world was in a tough spot. Its revenues had been falling for almost half a decade, to a 2016 low of $35 billion, and for the first time in a generation, the company’s bottom line turned red. When Snabe and his fellow board members met to assess the situation, however, they did the opposite of what you may expect: They got rid of their most profitable unit.
Though Maersk’s oil and gas activities were historically some of the biggest money-makers, the company decided to sell them off. “The business was still very valuable, and the company had great skills [in them],” Snabe said. “But we believed that in the long run, oil and gas would not be the fuel of the future, and we rather exited them.” So, in 2017, Total agreed to buy the Maersk oil unit for $7.5 billion, and a decades-long success story came to an end.
The core business Maersk was left with—container shipping—was a better bet to become a sustainable company, Snabe said. The company had already successfully lowered its CO2 emissions related to shipping, all while increasing freight volumes. It had, in other words, “de-coupled” growth from emissions.
But environmental success doesn’t automatically translate into financial success. From a value chain perspective, the ocean shipping component of transport, which Maersk dominated, was the least profitable part of logistics.
Supply-chain management, warehousing, and e-commerce logistics were either more profitable, had larger revenues, or both. “It led us to the conclusion that it was time to be something much more than a shipping company,” Snabe said. “We began to think about the role we play in society, and we ended up [wanting to be the] company that improves life for all by integrating the world and doing that in a sustainable way.”
There was the business opportunity, of course: Doing end-to-end logistics was more profitable and had higher revenues. But being a purpose-driven, innovative large player also opened the door to the connectivity and sustainability aspect.
What that looked like in practice became clear in the past few years. Maersk used the windfall of its oil unit sale to acquire companies across the value chain, it invested in developing green fuels and modern sail vessels, and it digitized the logistics industry. The results? Last year’s record revenues and profits speak for themselves.
But Maersk also made progress on a KPI that mattered perhaps even more than profit: It got on track to release its first-ever methanol-fueled vessel by this summer, allowing it to accelerate its company-wide carbon-neutral target to 2040. (The fact that oil and gas industries had their own record profits last year, Snabe said, did not alter his assessments of those industries' long-term outlook.)
What is the moral of the story? To have the most positive impact tomorrow, you may need to leave some money on the table today. Or, as Maersk did, you can cash in on your legacy activity and use it to fuel—pun intended—your business of the future.
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Peter Vanham
peter.vanham@fortune.com
