Inside Orient Overseas (International) Ltd

Orient Overseas is rather like DHL: it delivers door-to-door and enables customers to track packages in its care. For OOIL, however, the packages are dirty great containers - or 20ft equivalent units (TEUs) as they're known in the trade - rather than cardboard boxes and envelopes and these are moved a few thousand at a time on 300m long ships. Boats this big don't come cheap and OOIL has 37 at its disposal, 18 of which are owned and the remainder leased, typically on six- to eight-yea…