Maersk Mc-Kinney Moeller

His company’s roots go back to his grandfather Peter Maersk Moeller, a sea captain who told his son, A. P. Moeller, “You shall be a shipowner.” In 1904, the grandfather helped the son, then 28, form a steamship company whose assets consisted of one secondhand ship. By 1912, the family owned three shipping companies. By the late 1920s, the company had Denmark’s first oil tanker fleet. In rapid succession it acquired tremendous swaths of land in Africa for agriculture and a large refinery in Denmark. Mr. Mc-Kinney Moeller came in as a second-generation scion to help lead the company into the new container-shipping era. He was chairman from 1965 to 2003, but with his family holding most of the company’s voting shares, he remained a strong voice in decision-making until his death. A. P. Moeller-Maersk grew to become Denmark’s biggest company by far, with subsidiaries and offices in 135 countries and more than 100,000 employees. Mr. Mc-Kinney Moeller became one of the country’s most respected citizens. Abroad, he was the first non-American named to I.B.M.’s board, a seat he held for 14 years. His mother, Chastine Estelle Roberta McKinney, was born in Kentucky, and it was said he had considered himself half-American. He became a partner in the family company in 1940. By April of that year his father, worried that the Nazis would occupy Denmark, ordered the captains of the company’s 46 ships not to follow any orders received from home. He dispatched Maersk to New York, and the son ran the company from there during World War II. When his father died in 1965, Mr. Mc-Kinney Moeller became chief executive as well as chairman. Mr. Mc-Kinney Moeller, known as M.M.M. to his staff, was a very private man. “I hope you understand our peculiar inclination that we perhaps have the most to gain by being unobserved,” he said in an interview for the 1998 book “Moeller the Myth,” by Jan Cortzen. Mr. Mc-Kinney Moeller’s wife of 65 years, Emma, died in 2005. He is survived by his daughters, Ane Maersk Mc-Kinney Uggla, Leise Maersk Mc-Kinney Moeller and Kirsten Mc-Kinney Moeller Olufsen.