Open reference registry
Every shipping company, and the ships it sails.
95,871 merchant and state-operated vessels keyed on their IMO number, and the 1,799 companies that own and operate them — with founders, leadership, ownership, fleet composition and published capacity rankings. Every figure below is a count over records actually held. Nothing is estimated to fill a gap.
- Vessels on record
- 95,8716,280 attributed to an operator
- Companies
- 1,7991,543 commercial operators
- Flag states
- 212Distinct countries of registry
- Combined gross tonnage
- 1,757,376,060Summed where tonnage is recorded
Coverage, stated plainly
Of the 95,871 vessels held, 6,280 (7%) are linked to an identified operator. Fleet counts on company pages therefore reflect what can be attributed, not the company’s full fleet. Where an operator also publishes a fleet size — 30 companies do — that published figure is shown alongside, labelled and dated.
963 companies carry a written summary quoted from Wikipedia, 176 name at least one founder, and 16,709 vessels have a photograph we can attribute to its photographer. Where any of those is missing, the page simply does without it.
Published ranking
The largest container lines by capacity
Reproduced from a dated industry source. These are the industry's numbers, not this directory's — the last column is ours, and it counts something different.
| # | Company | Headquarters | TEU capacity | Reported ships | Market share | In registry |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Geneva | 7,318,632 | 1,000 | 21.6% | 36 | |
| 2 |  Maersk A/S Gemini | Copenhagen | 4,647,588 | 735 | 13.7% | 16 |
| 3 |  CMA CGM Ocean Alliance | Marseille | 4,273,202 | 723 | 12.6% | 49 |
| 4 |  COSCO Shipping Lines Ocean Alliance | Shanghai | 3,593,746 | 554 | 10.6% | 2 |
| 5 |  Hapag-Lloyd Gemini | Hamburg | 2,400,946 | 291 | 7.1% | 25 |
| 6 |  Ocean Network Express Premier Alliance | Tokyo | 2,134,872 | 272 | 6.3% | 42 |
| 7 |  Evergreen Marine Ocean Alliance | Luzhu District | 1,973,231 | 239 | 5.8% | 39 |
| 8 |  HMM Premier Alliance | Seoul | 1,029,773 | 97 | 3% | 13 |
| 9 |  Yang Ming Marine Transport Corporation Premier Alliance | Keelung | 741,908 | 98 | 2.2% | 2 |
| 10 | Haifa | 698,205 | 115 | 2.1% | 3 | |
| 11 | Taipei | 591,132 | 120 | 1.7% | 0 | |
| 12 | Singapore | 442,216 | 99 | 1.3% | 0 |
Ships in registry counts individual vessel records attributed to the company here. Reported fleet is the company’s published total. They measure different things and are shown separately on purpose.
Full ranking →Browse the registry
By type, flag, country and builder
Every bar below is a link into the filtered list. Widths are true proportions of the registry, not of the world fleet.
Vessels by type
Top flag states
Companies by country
Shipbuilders by hulls on record
Start here
Three ways in
Browse companies
1,799 operators across 129 countries — founders, leadership, ownership, fleet composition and a ten-year delivery record for each.
Search ships
95,871 vessels searchable by name, IMO number, call sign, type, flag and build year, with full particulars and rank by tonnage.
By country
Shipping sectors compared across 129 countries of registration, with the fleet each one holds between its operators.
Registry last refreshed 2026-09-05.