Why do shipping companies opt for the Boeing 747 instead of Antonov An-124?
This won’t be a real great answer, just major hurdles off the top of my head for wider AN-124 service.


Much shorter range. At 80,000 kg the AN-124 gets 4500 nm. 747-400 has a range of 7670 nm. 1
747 is slightly faster, cruising at .855 Mach
AN-124 is designed for a crew of 6; 747 has a crew of 3, or even 2 in the 747-8F
It would probably take Antonov a long time to catch up with Boeing’s production rates. 747-8’s are being produced about one a month. Back in the 70’s they were pumping out 80 or 90 of them per year.


I can’t find any numbers on fuel efficiency, but being that the Antonov was designed for military transport I would be very surprised if it could compete with the 747 in fuel usage. 

1 I was not able to find good range numbers for the Antonov. It’s hard to really pin down the numbers on the 747 also due to the number of variants. The numbers here are taken from the Wikipedia page for each.