It’s official! COSCO acquires the Hong Kong shipping company OOCL

The months of negotiation and procedures have ended and now it’s official. Cosco Shipping has officially purchased the Hong Kong shipping company: Overseas Container Line, OOCL. The operation comes after having obtained all the approvals of the international regulators: the SASAC of the Government of China, the anti-trust of the United Arab Emirates and the European Community.

The transaction has cost Cosco some 6,300 million dollars, approximately 5,100 million euros to change. With this, it has positioned itself as the third shipping company in the world ranking of container traffic, with 2.6 million TEUS and a total of 400 vessels, surpassing CMA-CGM.

OOCL, currently the eighth largest container line in the world, will remain operating under the same brand and without major changes.

But it does not stop there, in January COSCO also announced the purchase of an important logistics operator in Singapore for 490 million SGD (302 mill Eur). Continuing this way with the wave of mergers and acquisitions that have placed the six main shipping companies controlling more than 60% of the maritime logistics market.