(Bloomberg) -- A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, the world’s largest container line, said it had a good start to the year but warned that “considerable uncertainties” stemming from global trade tensions will probably hurt its business.

“New tariffs can potentially reduce expected growth in global container volumes by up to 1 percentage point,” the Copenhagen-based company said on Friday.

Maersk, which also unveiled plans to buy back $1.5 billion in shares over a 15-month period, said it is sticking with its guidance for the full year despite “weaker macro numbers as well as the risk from trade tensions.” The company also cited tougher fuel requirements designed to protect the environment as an additional challenge.

Shares in Maersk traded slightly higher in the Danish capital. The new buyback program “is positive and slightly better than our expectation that $1 billion of the Total SA share sale would be returned to shareholders,” Frode Morkedal, managing director at Clarksons, said in a note to clients.

Click here for more details from Maersk’s first-quarter results

Maersk, which transports about a fifth of the world’s manufactured goods by sea, faces a serious threat to its business as the trade war between the U.S. and China intensifies. Chief Executive Officer Soren Skou said on Friday that volumes on trans-Pacific trade between Asia and North America have already shown signs of decline. Maersk revealed on Friday that global container trade grew just 1.7% in the first quarter from a year earlier. That compares with 3.6% for all of 2018.

“The moderation of container demand growth reflects a broad-based slowdown in all the main economies,” Maersk said.

Friday’s report was Maersk’s first as a pure transportation company, after it ended its conglomerate structure earlier this year by de-merging Maersk Drilling, the last significant energy division in the group. It’s using some of the proceeds from the sale of its oil exploration activities to Total to finance the share buyback program. Maersk also said it will introduce a new dividend policy, with an annual payout ratio of 30%-50% of underlying net profit.

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  • See Maersk’s 1Q statement here
  • Read the Bloomberg Intelligence 1Q preview here

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--With assistance from Kati Pohjanpalo and Veronica Ek.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christian Wienberg in Copenhagen at cwienberg@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net

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