MSC Oscar

The MSC Oscar is an ultra-large container ship built for the Switzerland-based Mediterranean Shipping Company, delivered in 2015 from a South Korean shipyard as, at the time of its launch, one of the largest container ships in the world by cargo capacity, able to carry more than nineteen thousand twenty-foot equivalent unit containers. Built as part of a broader industry trend toward ever-larger container vessels intended to reduce the cost per container of long-distance ocean freight, the MSC Oscar and similarly sized ships of its era required upgraded port infrastructure, including larger cranes and deeper channels, at the major ports capable of handling them. Its scale reflected the container shipping industry's continuing pursuit of economies of scale on the busiest global trade routes, particularly between East Asia and Europe, even as such very large vessels raised new logistical challenges for the ports and canals that had to accommodate them.