China Shipping (Group) Co has received a 10 billion yuan (US$1.21 billion) credit line from the Bank of China to upgrade its fleet and en-hance its competitiveness in the global shipping industry.

The nation's second-largest container shipping liner signed the agreement with the country's second-largest lender yesterday.

The shipping company will also sign a financing pact worth 2.05 billion yuan with the BOC today.

Capital from the deal will be injected in ordering five new 5,688 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) ships, China Shipping said in a statement.

China Shipping has ordered five 5,688 twenty-foot equivalent units ships at the beginning of this year, following an order of another eight such ships in 2002.

"Like other shipping liners worldwide, we're replacing our old ships with larger ones to reduce operation costs. It is a global trend," Wang Zhide, a spokesman for China Shipping, said in an earlier interview.

Large-scale container ships usually refer to those carrying more than 3,000 standard containers.

The liner has invested more than 10 billion yuan in 50 container ships, oil tankers and bulk carriers over the past five years.

It is expected that China Shipping will have a combined shipping capacity of 14 million dead-weight tons and a container shipping capacity of 320,000 TEUs by the end of 2005.

The company's current container shipping capacity is 168,000 TEUs.

Shanghai-listed China Shipping Development Co, a subsidiary of China Shipping Group, posted a net profit of 458.09 million yuan in the first half of this year, a rise of 83.06 percent from a year earlier.

Its revenues reached 2.49 billion yuan in the first six months of this year, compared with 2.15 billion yuan a year earlier.

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