COSCO

COSCO SHIPPING Lines is often described as a Chinese state carrier that has simply always been large, which understates how recently its present shape came together. The company as it exists today was created in 2016, when the Chinese government directed the merger of two separate state-owned container carriers, COSCON and China Shipping Container Lines, into a single entity under China COSCO Shipping Corporation. The corporate lineage behind that merger runs back to 1961, which is why sources quote either date depending on what they are counting. The merged group is not organised as one company but as a family of separately listed and separately managed businesses: COSCO SHIPPING Holdings covers the container line, COSCO SHIPPING Ports runs the terminal portfolio, and other listed arms handle bulk, tankers, energy transport and specialised cargo. Two years after the merger, the group added a second container brand by acquiring a controlling interest in Hong Kong's Orient Overseas (International) Limited, parent of OOCL. That brand was deliberately not absorbed: OOCL still runs its own booking systems, its own container prefixes and its own commercial organisation, and the two lines coordinate through the alliance rather than through a shared operating platform.

By capacity, COSCO ranks fourth among global container lines, behind MSC, Maersk and CMA CGM, with published figures across 2026 putting the group's operated container capacity in the region of 3.3 to 3.6 million TEU depending on whether OOCL is counted in the total and which reporting date the source uses. COSCO SHIPPING Holdings reported self-operated vessels plus its orderbook at roughly 4.84 million TEU as of the first quarter of 2026, a figure that includes tonnage not yet delivered. The company is a member of the Ocean Alliance alongside CMA CGM, Evergreen and OOCL, which is the largest of the current alliance groupings by combined capacity. In February 2024 the four partners signed an extension carrying the agreement through to 31 March 2032, a longer runway than any competing bloc has committed to. That matters more than it might appear, because the alliance landscape changed materially in early 2025 when the 2M partnership between Maersk and MSC ended, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd launched Gemini, and MSC began operating standalone. Ocean Alliance was the one grouping that came through that reshuffle intact. COSCO's own network is weighted toward the Transpacific and Asia-Europe trades, supported by a dense intra-Asia base and services into the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

The distinguishing feature of COSCO's business model is vertical integration through infrastructure rather than through freight forwarding. COSCO SHIPPING Ports handled 61.3 million TEU across its terminal network in the first half of 2026, up 8.2 percent year on year, with overseas terminals growing considerably faster than the Chinese ones. That portfolio includes stakes in gateways well outside China, among them the Suez Canal Container Terminal and the newer Chancay facility in Peru, which the group has been developing as the anchor of a Pacific corridor into South America. The ports arm describes its approach as a "hub plus corridor plus network" model, pairing terminal stakes with inland logistics assets in markets including Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Brazil. On the fleet side, COSCO has been ordering aggressively and across multiple fuel pathways rather than betting on one: twelve 24,000 TEU methanol dual-fuel vessels, a further twelve 14,000 TEU methanol dual-fuel ships, conversions of existing tonnage to methanol, and in January 2026 a first move into LNG dual-fuel propulsion for large boxships with an order of eighteen vessels for roughly $2.7 billion. Maalbardaar tracks and clears COSCO shipments for Pakistani importers and exporters alongside the other lines it covers.