UK shipping: a tanker owner you've never heard of out-earned BP's entire fleet

The most profitable shipping company in Britain is one most people have never heard of. Union Maritime, a London tanker group founded in 2006, booked £481.6M of turnover and £150.0M of pre-tax profit — a 31% margin, though roughly half of that profit is gains on selling ships into a hot secondhand market — and more profit than BP Shipping’s entire £1.08bn fleet operation (£143.8M, a figure that itself includes group financing income). Its corporation-tax charge on that £150M was £452k — about 0.3%, and entirely by design: shipowners in the tonnage-tax regime are taxed on the size of their ships, not their profits, so in a strong tanker market almost everything they make, they keep. That is the real story of the 244 UK sea-freight companies that publish a full profit-and-loss, which book £20.98bn of combined turnover (nearer £20bn once group layers filing twice are deduplicated — see Methodology): the register is dominated by businesses that merely book shipping revenue in Britain — oil-major captive fleets, chartering desks, pool agencies, a cruise line, even a container port — while a much smaller set of genuine shipowners quietly earn some of the best and lightest-taxed margins in the economy. Figures are approximate — verify against a company’s own accounts before relying on any single number.

Read the register first

Four things change how you read every number below.

The biggest company in the category carries no freight. Carnival UK — the former Carnival plc, the UK-listed half of the Carnival dual-listed group, whose accounts consolidate AIDA, Costa, Cunard, P&O Cruises and P&O Australia — sits at the top with £7.59bn of turnover and £1.02bn of profit, over a third of the whole category’s revenue. It is a global passenger holiday group, not a British freight line, and it is excluded from every competitive read below.

The ferries aren’t here either. P&O Ferries, Stena Line, Wightlink, CalMac and the rest of the passenger-ferry fleet sit in a separate passenger-transport category. This map is cargo: tankers, short-sea traders, container and ro-ro lines, offshore-support vessels.

Much of the rest is a booking desk, not a fleet. London remains a world capital of ship management — so the register is full of UK entities of global owners where the revenue is enormous, the headcount is tiny, and the margin is set by intercompany agreement rather than by any market: Chevron’s two tanker companies, the Tankers International VLCC pool, EPS Chartering (£656.0M of revenue through 7 employees). Their sub-2% “margins” say nothing about shipping economics, and the 60% “margins” of some line agencies say just as little.

One port appears twice. Port of Felixstowe (£395.2M, £101.0M profit) and The Felixstowe Dock and Railway Company (£393.0M, £99.6M) are the same container port filing through two layers; the tables below use one entity. A port is infrastructure, not shipping, and its 24%-taxed profits make a useful control group for the tonnage-tax story below.

The giants: mostly other people’s business

Group layers: the Felixstowe port’s second filing entity (£393.0M) is folded into the row above, and Tankers (UK) Agencies is the parent of Tankers International (£547.4M) — one VLCC pool filing through two layers, shown once. Union Glory (£302.0M, £19.7M profit) is a consolidated subsidiary of Union Maritime, so its figures are already inside the group row. Carnival’s row is its year to November 2024; its year-to-November-2025 accounts (revenue around US$10.0bn) have since reached the register. Chevron’s two entities together put £1.83bn of revenue through the UK for £17.1M of profit — a margin that reflects intercompany pricing, not the tanker market.

The contrast at the top is the whole report. Chevron’s captive fleet books £1.83bn for a sub-1% margin because a captive fleet exists to move the group’s oil, not to make money. Union Maritime — 816 staff, founded two decades ago, still privately held — owns and trades its own tankers in one of the strongest tanker markets in years, and keeps a 31% margin on £481.6M — roughly half of it gains on selling ships into a hot secondhand market, the trading half of the owner-trader model. James Fisher, the Barrow-based listed marine-services group, is the struggler among the household names: barely break-even mid-turnaround, with £4.3M of pre-tax profit turning into a small after-tax loss on revenue down 10%.

The tonnage-tax dividend

UK shipowners can elect to pay corporation tax on a notional profit computed from their ships’ tonnage instead of their actual profits. In lean years that’s a floor; in a boom it is one of the most generous tax arrangements in the economy — and the accounts show it working. Compare the tax charges against pre-tax profit across the register:

The port pays the statutory rate. The shipowners pay a rounding error. That asymmetry — profits set by a hot charter market, tax set by deadweight tonnage — is why a strong tanker cycle shows up so vividly in this register, and why vessel-owning entities like Fortitude Shipping (a gas-carrier owner in the Petredec group: £116.6M revenue, £25.9M profit, 6 employees) keep appearing with profits out of all proportion to their headcount.

Owners, desks and agencies: three margins you cannot compare

The category mixes at least three revenue models, and comparing margins across them is meaningless:

• Asset owners (own or charter out vessels) earn the charter rate: margins run from low teens to over 50% in the current cycle.
• Captive fleets and pool agencies exist to move a parent’s cargo or to pass pool earnings through to members: EPS Chartering at 1.6%, Tankers (UK) Agencies at 0.1% and Chevron’s entities at ~1% are structural numbers, not performance.
• Line agencies and group service companies of foreign carriers can show almost any margin, because their revenue is an intercompany recharge — CMA CGM (UK) Shipping’s 61% margin on £25.7M with 319 staff is an accounting construction for the French line’s UK operation, not a business you can benchmark.

The size distribution reflects the same split: profitability climbs steadily with scale, from a third of the under-£1M tail (single-ship ventures, dormant-adjacent entities) to 85% of the £100M–1bn band, where the captives and established owners live.

The operators worth studying

Filter out the ports, the holding entities, the group desks and the duplicate filings, and a recognisable mid-market of genuine operators emerges — mostly niche liner trades and specialist tonnage, mostly profitable at margins a haulier would envy:

Osprey Maritime, showing identical turnover and headcount, is the same group filing through a second entity. Clydeport and Port of Sheerness (ports), Cosco Shipholdings (a six-person holding entity at a 61% margin) and the group desks of Stena, Solstad, Boskalis, Leif Hoegh and Zodiac are excluded from this read — their margins belong to other stories.

And one outlier deserves its own sentence: Direct Ferries, the Ipswich-based ferry-ticket platform, makes £21.6M of profit on £60.9M — a 35.5% margin selling other people’s ferry crossings online. It owns no ships and pays normal corporation tax, and it is still arguably the best pure business in the category: the aggregator out-earning most of the fleet owners it sells for.

Growth, read with care

The growth table needs more care than most. Bibby Maritime’s +5,612% is not a business taking off — it’s the owner of the Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge going from a near-idle year to £5.9M of charter revenue. Yebisu Shipping’s +123% at a 70% margin is charter income on owned tonnage, the tonnage-tax pattern again. The genuine cyclical story is offshore support: Tidewater Marine UK grew 63% to £136.4M at a 12% margin while hiring (+38% staff), with Boskalis Subsea North Star (+62%, 42% margin) and Solstad riding the same recovery in offshore day-rates — while Stena Icemax (+58%, −35% margin) shows the same market can still lose money on a drillship.

And the register carries a fresh warning about buying growth at the top of a cycle. Uniserve, the Essex freight forwarder, made ~£200M of profit in the 18 months to December 2021 (as restated) when container rates spiked; its latest year shows £20.2M on £243.9M — still a solid business, but a fifth of the peak. Ellerman City Liners, the container line relaunched in 2021 out of the same stable to capture those rates, lost £149.5M in 2023 and another £66.4M in 2024 — roughly £216M gone in two years, the single biggest hole in the category. Same boom, two endings: the forwarder kept the windfall; the new line bought ships into a collapsing market.

Market structure and vintage

On paper this is one of the most concentrated categories we’ve mapped — the top five hold 54.4% of the £20.98bn. But the curve overstates it: Carnival UK alone is over a third of the total, the VLCC pool’s two filing layers are both counted in the aggregate, and much of the rest of the top ten is captive or pass-through revenue. Strip the cruise line out and genuine sea freight is a ~£13bn category with a broad middle of £25–100M specialist operators.

The vintage profile is old at the anchor — 60 companies pre-date 1990, including Victorian-chartered names like the Felixstowe dock company — but unusually busy at the young end: 43 entities incorporated since 2021, many of them single-purpose vessel owners and chartering vehicles created for this cycle (Fortitude Shipping, 2022, is already at £116.6M). Ownership skews corporate (130 of 244), consistent with a register full of group entities; only 13 carry the Holdings/Bidco naming fingerprint of private-equity structuring — shipping’s capital comes from shipowners and majors, not buyout funds.

What the map shows

1. The best shipping business in Britain is an owner, not a mover. Union Maritime made £150.0M at a 31% margin — more profit than BP Shipping’s £1.08bn captive fleet — by owning tankers in a strong market, with roughly half of that profit gains on selling ships into a hot secondhand market.
2. Tonnage tax turns a boom into a keep-it-all boom. The shipowners’ tax charges run at ~0.1–0.3% of profit (Union Maritime £452k on £150.0M) while the port next door pays 24%. The regime is working exactly as designed; the scale of the asymmetry is still startling.
3. Most of the register is someone else’s business. A cruise line (£7.59bn), oil-major captives (£2.9bn+ across Chevron and BP), pool agencies and line desks book the majority of the revenue; their margins are intercompany arithmetic, not market signal.
4. The container boom’s bill has been paid here. Uniserve’s ~£200M profit peak (an 18-month period to December 2021) has faded to £20M, and Ellerman City Liners lost ~£216M in two years trying to turn the rate spike into a shipping line.
5. Offshore support is the genuine growth story — Tidewater (+63%, hiring), Boskalis and Solstad are riding recovering day-rates, the one place where growth, profit and headcount move together.
6. The best pure business owns no ships. Direct Ferries makes a 35.5% margin selling ferry tickets online — the aggregator out-earns most of the fleet.

Methodology and caveats

This covers only the UK sea and coastal freight companies that publish a full profit-and-loss — 244 of a register of around 707, so single-vessel owner-operators filing small-company accounts are invisible here. Passenger ferries and cruise operations sit in a separate passenger category (Carnival UK appears here only because of how it is registered, and is excluded from competitive reads). Where a group files through several entities — Felixstowe’s port, the Osprey pair, the Tankers (UK) Agencies/Tankers International pool, Union Maritime and its subsidiary — tables use one entity and note the layers, and group totals may differ from what any single entity shows; the £20.98bn headline total is the simple sum across all 244 filers and still counts those layers twice, so the deduplicated category total is nearer £20bn. Several of the majors — Union Maritime, BP Shipping, Chevron’s two entities, Carnival — prepare their accounts in US dollars; their sterling figures here are converted at roughly $1.32 to the pound, the average rate for 2024, so the numbers in their own accounts will read about a third larger. Each row uses the latest accounts available when the data was assembled — for most companies the year to late 2024 (James Fisher’s runs to 2025) — and newer accounts may since have reached the register. Margins are not comparable across the category’s different revenue models (asset owners, captive fleets, pool agencies, intercompany service entities, fee platforms); effective tax rates are computed from each company’s stated tax charge and pre-tax profit for its latest year and may reflect one-off items. Business-type labels are directional. Figures are approximate — this is analysis, not financial advice; verify any specific figure against the company’s own accounts.