Akkon Lines

Akkon Lines is younger than most of the containers it ships in. Registered on 7 September 2018 as Akkon Denizcilik Nakliyat ve Ticaret A.Ş., it was formed with wholly Turkish capital in partnership with Akarlar Shipping, a group with more than fifty years in Turkish maritime, and it was set up for a single specific purpose: regular container service between Türkiye and Libya. That narrow founding mandate is worth holding onto, because almost everything Akkon does now is an accretion onto a Libya shuttle rather than the execution of a global plan.

The expansion has been geographic and relentless, and the carrier documents it year by year. The 2018 head office in Istanbul came with branches in Izmir, Bursa and Mersin, and an Algeria office followed to extend the North African trade. Belgium, Spain and Tunisia were added in 2019; Italy and Russia in 2020; Romania and Ukraine in 2021; China, Morocco and the United Kingdom in 2022. In 2024 the line opened its own depot at Istanbul Ambarlı and established an India office. Bulgaria followed in 2026. The service network tracks that office map closely. Akkon left its core Mediterranean trades for the first time in October 2022 with a Far East-Med service, later expanded with a Qingdao call in September 2023 and run fortnightly on four vessels of 1,700 to 1,900 TEU. A West Europe-Casablanca service began in January 2023 on a 12-day cycle; a Türkiye-Europe service arrived in June 2023 with three vessels of 600 to 1,100 TEU; a Türkiye-Oran service opened the same month with a single 658 TEU ship; and a Türkiye-Israel service linking Iskenderun, Ashdod and Haifa launched in August 2023. In July 2026 the line added a Jeddah Express service calling Izmit, Gemlik, Ambarlı, Izmir and Jeddah, with two 1,100 TEU vessels on a 10-day frequency.

The pattern across all of these is the same: small ships, short cycles, and routes the large lines do not bother to serve directly. The fleet enabling this is overwhelmingly chartered — trade press has reported roughly 26 vessels totalling about 35,300 TEU with only a couple owned outright — which is the mechanism behind the speed: a chartered ship can be added to a new trade in weeks and returned when the trade disappoints, and it is also why any vessel count for Akkon is a snapshot rather than a characteristic. The ceiling on that approach has been rising. In 2025 Akkon chartered and operated the 4,626 TEU MV Liang Xiang 85, which it describes as the largest container vessel ever operated by a Turkish company, roughly double the size of the tonnage it deploys on its own named services. Maalbardaar tracks and clears Akkon Lines shipments moving into Karachi.