A new Onassis? Italy's sea captain swoops on reborn Alitalia

Sixty-five years after Aristotle Onassis founded Greece's Olympic Airways, another shipping entrepreneur is planning to take to the skies - this time in Italy, where Gianluigi Aponte's MSC has its sights on the successor company to Alitalia. The 81-year-old, known as "the captain" after building his shipping empire from a single vessel, is hoping to forge an air freight and passenger business to dovetail with MSC's sea cargo and cruise operations. But there are big challenges. Alitalia stumbled for years, with the Italian government spending an estimated E10b on rescue efforts before the airline's slimmed-down relaunch as ITA Airways last year. That means Rome is bound to monitor any deal very closely. What looks good on paper may also not be easy in practice. "Ocean and air freight are two modes of cargo transports with more differences than similarities," said Peter Sand, chief analyst at the air and ocean freight rate benchmarking platform Xeneta. "From a purely business perspective, it makes much less sense, even though MSC runs a cruise business, the synergies that they may reap from buying the former Alitalia can't be that big." But what MSC has in its favour are scale and resources. A global supply chain crunch has led to record, multibillion-dollar profits for the world's biggest shipping lines such as privately owned MSC, giving them the firepower to think longer term about how to grow their businesses. MSC, also known as Mediterranean Shipping Company, is already the world's No. 1 container shipping line by capacity, having inched ahead of Maersk . It is also the world's No. 3 cruise liner and set to become the second biggest in around 2025 when cruise ships on order arrive. In December, MSC made a E5.7b bid for Vincent Bollore's African logistics business, making an offer for ITA look relatively small by comparison. It has also teamed up with an experienced airline partner in Lufthansa. Story has more.<br/>