Xu Lirong Photo: Courtesy of Cosco shipping

State-owned shipping giant China COSCO Shipping Corp (COSCO SHIPPING) is striving to improve north-south connections in Europe, where most cargo traffic now moves east to west, Chairman Xu Lirong told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The number of Central and Eastern European countries accounts for 25 percent of the countries and regions along the China-proposed "One Belt, One Road" (B&R) initiative, Xu said.

He added that there are opportunities in building new logistics hubs in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and the company sees Poland as a potential market. 

The B&R initiative, which was proposed in 2013, is also known as the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

"We're planning large vessels with capacity of more than 13,000 20-foot equivalent units sailing to the Gdynia port, with the aim of providing stable and fast service from the Far East to Poland, nonstop," Xu told the Global Times during an exclusive interview.

The Gdynia port is a major international transportation hub situated in the central part of the southern Baltic coast, according to its website. Cargo throughput at the port was 18.19 million tons in 2015, the website showed.

The purchase of a 67 percent stake of the Port of Piraeus in Greece in April was seen by COSCO Shipping as another step closer to connecting southern and northern Europe.

"The company will not only focus on expanding its network in CEE, but also on deepening cooperation with the China-Europe freight train service," Xu said.

COSCO Shipping will also further invest in port infrastructure construction along the route of the B&R initiative, Xu noted during the Silk Road Forum 2016, which ran from Monday to Tuesday in Warsaw. 

"About 1 billion euros ($1.13 billion) will be put into maintaining the operations of ports in the near future," he said.

As shipping companies' profits weaken, COSCO SHIPPING is trying to lower its costs and seek more business opportunities via the newly formed Ocean Alliance, which will have market shares of nearly 35 percent on Asia-Europe services and 38.9 percent on Asia-North America routes, according to shipping data firm Alphaliner.