Back in November, Nils Smedegaard Andersen, CEO of Maersk, the world's largest shipping company, gave the world a reality check when it comes to global growth and trade.

"The world's economy is growing at a slower pace than the International Monetary Fund and other large forecasters are predicting" Andersen told Bloomberg. "We believe that global growth is slowing down [and that] trade is currently significantly weaker than it normally would be under the growth forecasts we see."

That amounted to a harsh indictment of the IMF's "built in optimism bias" (to quote HSBC), a bias which leads the Fund to perpetually revise down its estimates for global growth once it's no longer possible to deny reality. "We conduct a string of our own macro-economic forecasts and we see less growth - particularly in developing nations, but perhaps also in Europe," Andersen added. "Also for 2016, we're a little bit more pessimistic than most forecasters."

His comments came on the heels of a quarter in which Maersk's profits fell 61% Y/Y. On Wednesday, we got the latest numbers out of the shipping behemoth and the picture is most assuredly not pretty.

For 2015, profits fell a whopping 84% to $791 million from $5.02 billion in 2014. Analysts were looking for a profit of $3.7 billion. 

For Q4, the net loss came in at $2.51 billion, far worse than the Street expected. Shares of Maersk fell sharply in repsonse.

Not helping matters was Maersk's oil unit, which took a $2.5 billion impairment charge. "Given our expectation that the oil price will remain at a low level for a longer period, we have impaired the value of a number of Maersk Oil's assets," Andersen said. The company needs $45-55 a barrel to break even. Obviously, we're a long way from that. 

The outlook for Maersk Line - the company's golden goose and the world's largest container operator - racked up $182 million in red ink last quarter and the outlook for 2016 isn't pretty either. The company now sees demand for seaborne container transportation rising a meager 1-3% for the year. "Freight rates in 2015 averaged a monthly $620 a container on the key Asia to Europe trade route, with the break even level at more than $1,000," WSJ notes. "In February the cost of moving a container from Shanghai to Rotterdam fell to $431, according to the Shanghai Containerised Index, barely covering fuel costs."