COSCO Shipping rides the BRI wave to success

Dry bulk carriers are yellow, container ships are green, oil tankers are painted red, blue ones are multipurpose vessels, and those bearing pink spots are passengers liners.

No, these are not puzzles or a fantasy game. Rather, these are the color codes that come up on a giant screen at the China COSCO Shipping Corp Ltd headquarters on the east side of the Bund in Shanghai, which enables efficient tracking of the company's huge fleet.

COSCO Shipping, which has the largest shipping capacity in the world and the third largest number of container vessels, used to be two independent companies with huge deficits three years ago. All of that changed after the two entities were merged in 2016.