China Cosco Shipping Group (Coscocs), formed by the merger of Cosco Group and China Shipping Group, has established Coscocs Bulk Shipping in Guangzhou as part of its restructuring process.

The new bulk shipping arm integrates the dry bulk shipping assets of the two groups and has created the world's largest bulker fleet totalling more than 380 vessels with total capacity of more than 340m dwt.

In terms of size, the combined bulker fleet dwarfs anything else in the world – Japan's Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha (K Line) a distant 20m dwt behind in second place, show data supplied to Splash from VesselsValue.com.

Coscocs said it will retire 53 aged vessels with a total capacity of 2.89m dwt in the next two years to optimize capacity.

In March, Coscocs launched its container shipping arm China Lines, which will become the world's fourth largest container operator in terms of capacity.

With Coscocs's merger near completion, the landscape of Chinese maritime is now very different compared with a year ago. Containers and tankers for Coscocs are headquartered out of Shanghai and dry bulk out of Guangzhou. The big losers in this restructuring look like Tianjin and Hong Kong, which were previously important dry bulk centres for Cosco, and Dalian, where Cosco had its tanker division set up previously.