Dive Brief:

• China's antitrust regulators on Friday approved COSCO Shipping's purchase of OOIL, the parent company of OOCL, according to various news outlets.
• The approval puts the Chinese shipping giant one step away from completing the deal, only awaiting the results of a review from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. over the fate of an OOCL terminal at the Port of Long Beach, The Wall Street Journal reports.
• Once finalized, the purchase would provide COSCO a fleet of around 400 vessels and annual capacity of roughly 2.7 million TEU, making it the third-largest ocean freight carrier in the world, Port Technology reports.

Dive Insight:

The COSCO-OOCL deal is the last remaining merger in the wave of acquisitions between 2015 and 2017 that reshaped the shipping industry.

Its approval is all but certain now, as antitrust regulators from China, the EU, and the U.S. have all given the deal a green light. The Committee of Foreign Investment's review will likely be offset by a sale of OOCL's Long Beach Container Terminal to another shipping company, according to previous reports.

The final die will be cast in July. And once it is — three years after COSCO's purchase of China Shipping, and one year past the OOCL deal's first announcement — six carriers will officially control more than two-thirds of the world's capacity.