Our History

“No money, but with plenty of ideas in my head as luggage”

On October 27, 1950, he founded Empresa de Navegação Aliança. In the 1950s, the company operated on two fronts: cabotage (shipping cargo between ports in the same country) at 11 Brazilian ports, from Rio Grande (RS) to Belém (PA), and refrigerated cargo transport between Brazil and Argentina, with occasional calls in Uruguay. In 1959, Aliança was appointed to carry 50% of the refrigerated cargo between Brazil and Argentina. The ships carried bananas and oranges and returned with Argentine meat and apples.

“With a regular operation of almost 30 ships, every day Aliança had one ship arriving in Brazil and another leaving for Europe! There were always five ships loading and another five unloading in Brazilian ports, and the same number in European ports”

With the growth of foreign trade during the economic miracle, Aliança’s ships began to be built in Brazilian shipyards, starting with the Petrópolis in 1968, followed by four refrigerated ships. Rio de Janeiro became the second largest shipbuilding hub in the world. In the 1970s, the company’s own fleet included 5 Brazilian Liners, 3 Polish Liners, 4 SD-14s and 4 refrigerated ships.

In 1977, Aliança served more than 42 ports in Europe and South America.

“I don’t know who imagines an exporter would put even a single bag of coffee inside a container!”

In 1994 and 1995, the ships Aliança Brasil and Aliança Europa arrived, with 2,303 TEU each: the last of the more than 30 ships Aliança built in Brazilian shipyards at the time.

Well capitalized to face the opening of the market, Aliança sought new markets. In 1991, it began operating on the route to the United States.

The fleet grew along with demand. Ships that had made history in deep-sea shipping – such as the Copacabana, the Flamengo, the Aliança Brasil and the Aliança Europa – began operating in cabotage and, in 2005, the new Aliança Manaus and Aliança Santos entered service.

In the 2000s, the company set up two shipping loops. The first was an express route between Santos and Manaus, with calls in the Northeast. The second linked Buenos Aires, the South and the Southeast to the northeastern ports. In 2003, Aliança created its own truck fleet in Manaus, integrating sea and road.

More than space, the Explorers brought consistency: for the first time, every week of the rotation had a ship of similar capacity. With more predictability and capacity, the shift of cargo from road to sea gained momentum. According to ABAC (the Brazilian Association of Cabotage Shipowners), Brazilian cabotage grew 12% in 2017, 8% in 2018 and 16% in 2019.

The integration brought together complementary strategies. In 2016, Maersk had announced its transformation into a global logistics integrator, expanding its scope to offer end-to-end solutions to customers. For Aliança, this move reinforced a vision it had held since relaunching cabotage in 1999: sea transport creates more value when it is connected to the entire logistics chain, from the port to the customer’s door.

Following this integration, Aliança’s logistics structure gained scale. The group expanded its land fleet with 113 more truck tractors and 222 trailers, as well as its own road operations in Pernambuco, Bahia and Santa Catarina. New warehouses were added to the operation, including the Cajamar (SP) and Cabo de Santo Agostinho (PE) units, while control towers began monitoring all land movements in real time.

With the end of Brazil’s bilateral maritime agreements with Chile and Argentina in 2020 and 2021, Aliança ended its Mercosur operations and began focusing exclusively on the Brazilian market, with an emphasis on cabotage and door-to-door integrated logistics. The change ended a historic presence in Argentina that had begun in the company’s early years with refrigerated transport between the two countries.

With two control towers, it monitors more than a thousand land movements a day across the country, ensuring visibility, control and management. Digital tools complement this operation: the Portal da Cabotagem, the Portal Cotação and Captain Peter, a virtual assistant that tracks the temperature and humidity of refrigerated containers in real time.

Today, with more than 850 employees and 10 offices throughout Brazil, Aliança operates 3 shipping loops connecting more than 14 ports and serves around 2,000 customers in more than 660 Brazilian cities. As part of A.P. Moller-Maersk, it combines deep knowledge of the Brazilian market with the strength of a global integrated logistics powerhouse.