[seymore_12]

Top ocean carriers (including Maersk) are mature and well established organizations. For what concerns their core activities, that is transporting of containers from A to B across oceans, short sea and occasional inland, they are Pareto efficient [1]

The surge in the transportation services demand during COVID couldn't be resolved by additional hiring and was offset by increase in freight rates, hence the enormous profits. They couldn't resolve surge demand by hiring, as their bottleneck was and still is the land infrastructure, sea ports, terminal (in)efficiency, inland transport to which they have little control of.

Maersk decided to become vertically integrated carrier and started acquiring various companies, including last mile delivery services, custom's brokers, air freight capacity etc. This, in my opinion, contributed to the increase in the headcount.

Other carriers followed the Maersk acquisition spree...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency