The secretive shipping magnate set to gain control of Britain’s biggest port

Italian shipping magnate Gianluigi Aponte pulled off one of the transport deals of the decade with his $23bn (£18bn) agreement to buy 45 ports from Hong Kong billionaire Sir Li Ka-shing, The Telegraph reported.

The acquisition, announced this month, will establish Aponte’s Mediterranean Shipping Co. (MSC) as the world’s biggest ports operator – continuing the rise of a once obscure company that last year overtook Danish rival Maersk to become the number one shipping line.

The purchase, backed by US investment house BlackRock, includes two key ports on the Panama Canal, and in so doing will effectively remove the vital link between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from China’s sphere of influence.

It came weeks after Donald Trump complained that ownership of the ports by Sir Li’s Hong Kong-based Hutchison Group meant the canal was under de facto Chinese control, and indicated that he planned to address the situation.

Press coverage has largely focused on the Panama Canal portion of the deal given its link to Trump. However, the transaction will also impact the UK, with the Port of Felixstowe, Britain biggest, among the clutch of ports set to change hands.

The transaction comes at a challenging time for the 175-year-old complex at the mouth of the River Orwell in Suffolk, as it struggles to add capacity while suffering from a relative lack of investment compared with faster-growing rivals. The takeover has sparked hopes that Felixstowe’s publicity-shy new billionaire owner could revive its fortunes.

Mr Aponte, 84, was born in Sorrento and worked as the captain of a Naples to Capri ferry before buying his first cargo vessel in 1969 and founding MSC the following year.

The company moved its base to land-locked Switzerland in 1978, adding the cruise arm for which it is best known among the wider public a decade later and making a first foray into port operations in 2000. In the last few years it has even opened its own cargo airline.

The growth trajectory has seen Mr Aponte’s personal fortune swell to $37bn, according to Forbes, almost exactly the same as Sir Li’s.

While Mr Aponte remains MSC’s owner and chairman, the company has been led for a decade by his son Diego, who said of the Hutchison deal that it represented “a very viable investment”.

That qualified almost as verbose for MSC, which has a long history of eschewing public pronouncements.

The family and MSC executives almost never give interviews, while the group’s financial results were not made public until 2022, when documents relating to a bid for a rail company revealed that it had that year generated a net profit of €36bn on €86bn in turnover.

MSC’s to bring back Felixstowe’s ‘spark’

Businesses that depend on Felixstowe are hopeful that MSC’s spending power will provide the port with a new lease of life following the takeover.

Mark Ling of ICE Transport, based in nearby Ipswich, says Felixstowe “is a little bit like the port where time stood still”, having had no major infrastructure upgrades since 1982.

The lack of investment has been clear in recent years. Felixstowe saw ships diverted to other ports during Covid as its limited facilities filled up with containers, and again in 2022 when it was rocked by its first strikes in three decades.

MSC will “hopefully bring spark and drive and energy to the port”, Ling says.

David Rowe, Felixstowe’s mayor, says the town’s livelihood largely depends on the health of its docks and complained that inadequate road and rail links were costing it £200m a year in lost trade.

The Suffolk Chamber of Commerce believes the takeover will be neutral to positive in terms of its impact on container volumes, bolstering the case for the Government to invest more in the rail links connecting Felixstowe with the Midlands and North. The routes have long been plagued by bottlenecks.

A spokesman for MSC said the company was cheered by the “positive reception” from the UK to the takeover but declined to comment on its plans for the port.

While Felixstowe has been treading water, London Gateway port, located 50 miles along the coast in Essex, has been rapidly expanding ever since opening in 2013 on the site of the former Shell Haven refinery near Thurrock.

A further £1bn investment appeared to be at risk last year after owner DP World threatened to pull the plug. That came after Louise Haigh, then a Labour minister, criticised another of its businesses, P&O Ferries, for firing 800 staff by text message in 2022.

Sir Keir Starmer ultimately issued an apology to DP World and the Dubai-based company unveiled the plan at the Prime Minister’s investment summit in October.

The Gulf company said on Friday that work on adding two more 1,300-foot berths at London Gateway would begin in May, creating 1,000 construction jobs and 400 permanent ones. The new berths will allow the port to accommodate six of the world’s largest container ships at any one time.

Ernst Schulze, DP World’s UK chief, said he was confident of overtaking Felixstowe even before the expansion. Container numbers at London Gateway are to be buoyed by Maersk’s transfer of key Asian and Middle Eastern sailings from the Suffolk port.

ICE’s Ling suggested Maersk’s defection, which came about after the Danish firm created an alliance with Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, showed management at Felixstowe had been “asleep at the wheel”.

With the alliance’s first vessel docking at London Gateway last Thursday, Schulze said he expects the port to become the UK number one by container numbers either this year or next.

Whether MSC will be leading a fightback at Felixstowe is not yet entirely clear, however. While the deal has been announced it has not been completed, and Sir Li is under increasing pressure from China to walk away from the sale.

Analysts have suggested that Hutchison’s exit from ports to focus on other industries in a portfolio that also spans retail, telecoms and utilities makes sense.

Beijing, though, has pushed back against the transaction, with official media accusing President Trump of manipulating the situation in order to gain an advantage over China in an escalating trade war with the US.