Maersk Line to lay off as many as 3,000

"The U.S. situation is a problem for us and for the entire industry," said Eivind Kolding, chief executive of Maersk Line, the company's container shipping division. "We are expecting no growth to very slow growth in the U.S. this year."

Maersk is the biggest player in a fragmented global cargo movement industry dominated by foreign conglomerates. Maersk controls more than 16% of the world's liner fleet, according to AXSMarine, a French maritime research company. Maersk's fleet is so enormous that it can put to sea at once more cargo containers than all but the largest U.S. ports handle in an entire year.

Maersk Line lost $568 million in 2006, eked out only a small profit in 2007 and now must take several steps to streamline its operations, company executives said in a Tuesday conference call with reporters and financial analysts. The U.S. economy, hard hit by a real estate bust and consumer weakness related to high fuel costs, played a big role.

The effect of tightfisted shoppers is apparent at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation's largest container facilities by volume. The two ports had been averaging overall cargo growth of about 10% for each of the last 14 years, but through November, they had handled about 14.4 million containers, a decline of about 100,000 from 2006.

Collectively, the 10 busiest container ports in the U.S. ended a four-month string of year-over-year cargo traffic declines last month when they recorded an increase of more than 3% over December 2006, according to a monthly report released Tuesday by the National Retail Federation and the business research firm Global Insight.

But the report also said that "the slow pace of container traffic growth is forecast to continue through May due to weakness in the U.S. economy."

For most of this decade, Maersk Line rode the boom in globalization, tripling the size of its fleet capacity to nearly 1.8 million containers.

But its performance has faltered relative to some of its strongest competitors -- particularly Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Co. and CMA CGM of Marseille, France -- since it acquired rival P&O Nedlloyd in 2005.