IBM and Maersk form joint venture to launch a blockchain-based platform for the global supply chain and will create a new company to commercialize it
IBM and Maersk have been collaborating on creating a blockchain platform for the global supply chain. Now the duo will create a new company to commercialize the platform broadly.
Context & Ripple Effects
This joint venture is the commercialization step of an arc that began well before the announcement: IBM had already built a sandbox platform in 2016 for testing blockchain record-keeping in supply chains, and Maersk and IBM ran a container-tracking pilot in 2017 targeting ten million tracked containers by year-end. Today's move turns that experiment into a standalone company, signaling both partners intend to sell the platform to the whole industry rather than run it as an internal tool.
What came after matters for reading this story: the platform launched globally as TradeLens with 94 clients and over 154 million recorded shipping events within months of this announcement (the August 2018 launch), yet IBM and Maersk ultimately decided to shut it down in early 2023, with Maersk citing insufficient industry collaboration. The JV structure announced here — two dominant players owning the rails — is precisely the governance model that later failed to win over rival carriers.
First-order effects
- Maersk gains a dedicated company through which to push digital documentation onto other ocean carriers, freight forwarders, and customs authorities, while IBM converts its 2016-era supply chain blockchain experiments into a revenue-bearing product rather than a research project.
Second-order effects
- Rival shipping lines now face a choice between joining a platform co-owned by their largest competitor or funding alternatives — a competitive dynamic that, per Maersk's own later explanation for TradeLens's closure, kept broad industry participation from materializing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consortium platforms built on top of one incumbent's market power struggle to achieve the network neutrality they need, pointing toward either independently governed standards bodies or the quiet retreat from enterprise blockchain that TradeLens's shutdown came to represent.
The trend: Enterprise blockchain consortia of the late 2010s rose on pilot momentum but stalled where platform ownership sat with a dominant industry player rather than a neutral body.