FORTUNE -- Consumers rarely see one of the most important and dramatic elements of the increasingly global economy: the mammoth ships that keep the whole system moving. Virtually everything we buy traveled by ship at some point or contains materials that did, so shipping trends show how world trade is shifting. By far the largest force in global shipping is A.P. Møller-Maersk, the Copenhagen-based company that operates more than 500 container ships and 225 tankers, in addition to developing ports, operating drilling rigs, and offering related services. Even dominant size doesn't fully shield Maersk from the whipsawing global economy: 2009 was its worst year ever, and 2010 was its best.
At the helm is Nils Andersen, 53, who became CEO in 2007 after a career in consumer products, mostly with Carlsberg, the brewer. He spends much of his time visiting newly emerging markets, which have no chance of entering the global economy without modern ports and infrastructure; Maersk can build and manage them. Andersen talked recently with Fortune's Geoff Colvin about why he's building the world's largest ships, the trade routes that are growing fastest, the overlooked tragedy of piracy, and much else. Edited excerpts:
Q: Your business is a barometer of global trade. What are you seeing?
A: The developed world has a lot of problems, and that has an impact on global growth. The African and Latin American countries live from raw materials to a large extent, and China and Asia live from exporting things at least partly into the developed world. But overall we see great growth and good development still, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Europe is actually still doing quite well -- we have 5% growth in our transported volumes to Europe. The U.S. is very quiet at the moment -- not declining, just stable.
The traditional trade routes are changing -- the greatest volumes are not going to be where they used to be. What are the trends?
The changes are very clear. You see a lot of growth in the corridors from Asia to Africa and Latin America, and back with minerals from Africa and refrigerated fruits and foodstuffs from Latin America. You see these parts of the world starting to trade much more with each other. There's also a lot of growth in inter-Asia trade.
The traditional corridors from Asia to Europe and from Asia to the U.S. are growing slowly. For us it just means we have to look for growth elsewhere. We've ordered specialized vessels for the trades to Africa and South America that we are putting into operation now. So our business is growing very nicely.
Why create special ships for the trade between West Africa and Asia?
We're the biggest transporter in and out of Africa, and so we have very intense knowledge of the trading patterns in that part of the world, including what the drafts are in ports and how we could best design ships. So we worked with shipyards to create a new kind of vessel that could go into ports with difficult, low drafts and still have a reasonable size. A very important part of Africa's development is getting more access to the global economy. We have to bring down transportation costs into and out of Africa.
That gets to a larger point, which is that Maersk is often the first multinational corporation in a developing country. How come?
I went to the World Economic Forum this year, where there was a lot of talk about getting more growth to the developing world. When you listen in on the sessions, it's very clear that a lot of things that determine how a country can be successful are logistics. It has to be relatively inexpensive to ship in and out. [Countries] need an effective port infrastructure. They need inland depots, roads, and so on, and our company provides solutions to many of these challenges. So for us to go into a country early is of course very good for us, but it's also very good for the country because it enables it to become part of the global economy.
Maersk earlier this year announced it has commissioned the largest ship ever built and has since ordered 20 of them, costing $190 million apiece. Each one can carry 18,000 shipping containers. What's the strategy behind this dramatic move?
When you go from Asia to Europe, it's a maturing trade. Growth is slowing down. It's our most important trade, and we have very large markets there. So it's key to take cost out, and these vessels are very cost-effective. They are also very much in line with our ambition to bring down our greenhouse-gas emissions. These vessels will emit 50% less CO2 than the average ship trading between Asia and Europe.
Can U.S. ports handle these ships?
You could probably squeeze them into a couple of U.S. ports, but the U.S. port infrastructure is not laid out for vessels of this size. They would basically trade between the largest ports in Asia and the largest ports in Europe.
Which are?
Rotterdam, Bremerhaven [Germany], and Felixstowe [England] in Europe. In Asia it's Shanghai, Ningbo, and others in South China, and our own Tanjung Pelepas port in Malaysia. These are the biggest ports, and the new ships can easily trade there. But it's not just a matter of water depth and quayside. When someone offloads 18,000 containers in a port, you have to make sure you can get them out. So it's inland infrastructure as well. It's quite a job.
Emissions are becoming a large issue in your industry, which faces an interesting situation. Shipping typically uses very dirty fuel, yet it's so efficient that it still is the least polluting mode of transport per unit volume.
It is. There are two kinds of pollution. You have CO2 emissions, where it's a matter of getting fuel consumption as low as possible. But you also have pollution from sulfur and other dangerous substances, and on that we've pioneered a fuel switch with the Port of Los Angeles and the members of Congress from Los Angeles. We've worked with the engine manufacturers to ensure that the engines can also work with something very close to normal diesel that doesn't contain as much sulfur. So if you use that fuel when you come close to coastal areas, your pollution reduces to almost nothing. This is now becoming standard globally. Whenever a vessel gets within 25 nautical miles of a coastline in Europe, it has to switch to the low-sulfur fuel. That will be effective from 2015.
These giant new ships are the first ships ever designed to go less fast than the previous generation. Why?
When the whole discussions of CO2 came, we commissioned a working group of technicians and scientists in our headquarters in Denmark to come up with solutions that could dramatically reduce consumption of fuel on ships. You go through a lot of things -- size, hull shape, speed, which paints you use on the hull, your navigation system, how you go with the current and with the waves, how you load the ship. We're extremely proud of what came out of it. Today we're a clear leader in the environmental area, which is also good for profits, because with high fuel prices, reduced consumption is money in the bank.
For customers, speed has traditionally been very valuable. Are they telling you that it's now less important?
We realized that reducing speed is not ideal for the customer. So we went to see thousands of customers to hear what is important for them, and the thing that came out on top was reliability, because if we can make our vessels more reliable, customers can cut their stocks. Just imagine -- 50% of the container ships in the world do not arrive on time. It's very, very unacceptable. So we attacked that. The most significant achievement we're making is trying to get from 50% to 95% reliability so that customers actually know that when they ship with Maersk, the container arrives on time. For most people from outside the industry, that's what you'd expect.
People may not realize that Maersk has a significant business producing oil in various places around the world, so you obviously have a deep interest in the price of oil. What's the outlook?
The price at the moment is high -- very high in a historical perspective. New finds are being made at very deep water depths, and very complicated production systems are required. So it's hard to see that you can produce more oil unless the price stays high. We are quite bullish on the oil price, taking into account that even with slow growth at the moment, world consumption of oil and gas is still increasing. We think prices will stay high. They may go down $20 for a while, but we think they'll stay pretty high.
Your business uses a lot of capital -- $12 billion in the first half of this year. The end of cheap capital has been forecast for a few years now, yet at this moment capital is about as cheap as it has ever been. Is the end of cheap capital coming soon?
Capital is basically too cheap for healthy global development. It reflects the fact that governments have a lot of debt and need to stimulate the economy. If we want to make sure investments are flowing in healthy directions and you don't have bubbles, the cost of borrowing should be a bit higher. We actually have a pretty high cost of capital in our company because after the financial crisis, we reduced our borrowing. So we are working much more with equity, which puts more pressure on us to make money.
Shipping faces a danger that a lot of businesses face, which is becoming a commodity service sold purely on price. How do you avoid commoditization?
We've been giving that a lot of thought. I think one of the reasons the industry has become commoditized is that service has not been good historically. I'm not talking about Maersk -- we've been doing a pretty good job. But if you talk about the industry, when customers expect that only half of their containers will arrive on time, you just try to get the best deal.
What we're working on now is customer-focused innovation. This week we launched a new initiative, which is daily sailings from Asia to Europe with a penalty if we arrive too late. So instead of building up a big stock that a customer would ship every Friday with the sailing from Shanghai to Rotterdam, he can now ship every day and deliver smaller amounts. And we guarantee that they arrive on the date that we agreed. If they don't, the customer gets a payment, so we have some money in the game as well. This is at least an attempt to solve a customer problem, and we become a more effective part of his supply chain. We'll see whether it works. I'm sure that in three months' time, customers will have learned to appreciate that a lot.
In any other industry, that would not be an innovation. Are you the first in the business to do it?
We're the first ones, and it is actually a complicated thing because you need to make sure that all the ports on the way operate 100% as planned. You have to have buffers in place if there's a typhoon hitting or there's an accident in the Suez Canal or whatever. You have to make sure you're prepared for almost everything. We've analyzed this for a long, long time, and I don't think it's easy to copy. You need 70 ships to run such a string, and you need to make sure it works like clockwork. We think we can do it, and if not, we'll have to pay a lot of compensation to angry customers. But even in that case, they will be better off than they were before.
We haven't heard much about piracy off Somalia in the past couple of years, at least not with regard to commercial shipping. What has changed there?
Unfortunately, one thing that has changed is that the world has gotten used to it. It's not new anymore, which is quite tragic because you have maybe 700 seafarers sitting as hostages ...
Right now?
Right now. It's still a very, very dramatic situation, but the world has just forgotten it. We're doing what we can to avoid trouble for our ships, which we can do because they are large. They can sail fast. You can have passive protection like water flooding on the deck and barbed wire and stuff like that. But it's not possible for everybody to do that.
It is a forgotten tragedy, and it is especially tragic because this is in a part of the world where you have a lot of poverty. You need to get goods in, basic foodstuffs, to alleviate hunger and other problems. So it's doubly bad in the sense that it prevents the development of a region.
What's the outlook?
I don't think the immediate outlook is very good. The pirates are becoming more aggressive. It's a very, very unpleasant situation, and it's not easy to handle because you can obviously capture the pirates at sea, but on land the people hardly have any alternative to piracy. So there's a development effort needed to resolve the issue.
Ocean shipping is enormously important to the global economy, yet it's almost invisible to the general public. What should people know about it that they don't know?
The great thing about global shipping is that it has enabled global trade to flourish. Containerization bringing down costs dramatically is what has enabled a lot of production in places where it's inexpensive. That leads to lower prices in the developed countries and the great spreading of wealth across the world.
People don't see it because you rarely meet a 400-meter-long ship on the highway. It's not so visible on land, but it is really essential for the creation of global wealth.
The Leadership Series: Formerly called "C-Suite Strategies," this is the latest interview with a top executive by Fortune senior editor-at-large Geoff Colvin. See video excerpts of this interview at fortune.com/leadership -- plus find Colvin interviews with Charles Schwab, the team of Jeff Immelt (GE) and A.G. Lafley (P&G), former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, Pimco's Mohamed El-Erian, Humana CEO Michael McCallister, and many more. 
