Evergreen

Evergreen Marine Corporation traces back to 1968, when Chang Yung-fa, a former ship's captain, registered the company in Taiwan with a single secondhand cargo vessel. By 1985 the line had grown into the largest container carrier in the world, an unusual trajectory for a company barely two decades old at the time. Chang went on to found EVA Air in 1989, and the two businesses, alongside hotel and logistics interests, now sit under the wider Evergreen Group, a Taiwanese conglomerate with affiliates across more than 100 countries. Evergreen Marine and EVA Air remain related through common ownership rather than being divisions of one another, which is why the green-and-white livery shows up on both container ships and aircraft without the companies being operationally merged. Chang died in January 2016, and Taiwan's president posthumously recognized his role in building the group.

The carrier's fleet currently runs to roughly 239 vessels totaling around 1.9 million TEU of capacity, a mix of owned and chartered tonnage that ranks it among the world's largest lines by capacity. Vessel sizes span from feeders of a few thousand TEU up to the A-class ships, which carry close to 24,000 TEU and rank among the largest container vessels afloat. Evergreen has continued to add capacity: in 2025 it placed orders worth roughly $1.47 billion for 23 new containerships, a mix of 3,100 TEU feeders and 5,900 TEU mid-size vessels, pushing its order book toward 930,000 TEU. Evergreen operates within the Ocean Alliance, the vessel-sharing agreement it shares with CMA CGM, COSCO Shipping Lines and OOCL. That alliance was extended through March 2027 and then, in a further agreement reached in 2024, stretched again out to 2032, giving the four lines a long-run framework for coordinating vessel deployment and slot-sharing across the major east-west trades. Evergreen's network is strongest on the Transpacific and Asia-Europe corridors, alongside intra-Asia, Asia-Mediterranean, Latin America and Transatlantic services, reflecting the alliance's combined route network rather than Evergreen sailing every lane independently.

A structural feature of Evergreen's business model, sometimes overlooked, is how much of its fleet has historically been chartered rather than owned outright, including large blocks of ships leased long-term from related entities such as Shoei Kisen Kaisha and from independent lessors like Costamare. That arrangement let Evergreen scale capacity quickly during periods of strong demand without carrying the full capital cost of newbuilds on its own balance sheet. More recently the company has shifted some of that balance back toward ownership: in 2025 it moved to acquire around ten vessels it had previously chartered, a step it described as giving it more control over deployment and scheduling and reducing long-run leasing costs. Evergreen also drew brief, unusual global attention in March 2021 when the Evergreen-chartered ultra-large container ship Ever Given ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for six days, disrupting a meaningful share of global east-west trade for the duration of the incident; the episode was a chartering and navigation event tied to that single vessel rather than a reflection of Evergreen's broader fleet operations, but it remains the most widely recognized moment in the company's recent public profile. Maalbardaar's customers who import or export cargo moving on Evergreen bookings can track and clear those shipments through the same platform used for other carriers.