John Swire of Liverpool (1793-1847) was in fact originally from Yorkshire. His family had farmed near Skipton for a number of generations before John’s grandfather – also John Swire – went into the textile trade; his son Samuel followed him into this business. However, both father and son came unstuck financially and their ventures ended in bankruptcy. Family insolvency may well have been the spur that drove young John Swire, eldest of Sam’s ten children, to try his luck in Liverpool.

“John Swire, merchant”’s first recorded imports were from America: quercitron bark (used in dyeing textiles) and raw cotton – which was to become a significant commodity in the firm’s import trades. He gradually built a successful business based almost exclusively on imports from North America (flour, animal hides, turpentine, tar) and the West Indies (coffee, spices, sugar and rum).

John Swire died young from cancer in 1847 and the business passed jointly to his two sons, John Samuel and William Hudson Swire, who were then 21 and 17 years of age; when William came of age in 1851, the company took the name “John Swire & Sons”. From the outset, John Samuel Swire (1825-1898) was the entrepreneurial driving force behind the development of the business, while William – dogged by ill-health – played a less active role, eventually selling his share to his elder brother.

The firm began to invest in sailing ships: firstly, in 1850, with a 22% shareholding in the barque Theodore, and then in 1853 with a majority 31% of the new Liverpool-built iron clipper ship, Evangeline. Both of these ships operated in the New Orleans trade – which primarily involved raw cotton – and sailed under the colours of the Liverpool shipping company, Clint & Co.

By 1854, John Samuel Swire had decided to expand to Australia, where the discovery of gold in Victoria and rapid growth of the new colony offered unprecedented business opportunities. In Melbourne, he established “Swire Bros.” and was soon importing a wide variety of goods, ranging from iron bars, arsenic and “blasting powder”, to barrels of pork, boots, blankets and bottled beer. After four years, he returned to Liverpool. John Swire & Sons’ export business to Australia continued to flourish, but the lasting importance of the Melbourne branch was to switch Swire’s trading focus away from the New Orleans cotton trade, which was severely curtailed by the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. By the early 1860s, John Swire & Sons had begun to ship woollen goods and cotton shirting material to China, after the Treaty of Tientsin opened the door to foreign trade. In Shanghai, goods were consigned to the firm of Preston, Bruell & Co, but John Swire became increasingly frustrated by the poor performance of this agent.

In 1865, he was approached by the brothers Alfred and Philip Holt to buy shares in their projected new steamer service to China. Alfred Holt had designed a series of steamers with innovative compound engines that made them very low on coal consumption. Up to this point, the trades to the Far East and beyond had been dominated by sailing ships, but Holt’s new vessels – to be built on the Clyde by the firm of Scott’s Shipbuilding – opened up the possibility of making long sea voyages under steam commercially viable. At a stroke, they revolutionised the shipping industry. John Swire duly became a shareholder in the Ocean Steam Ship Company and Agamemnon – the first ship of the line that was to become universally known as Blue Funnel – sailed for Shanghai in April 1866. Preston, Bruell & Co. was appointed ship’s agent; however, when it became clear firm was in financial difficulties, John Swire resolved to open his own China house and take over the Holts agency. To guarantee a stream of goods, he formed a partnership with a woollen manufacturer, Richard Butterfield, and then set sail for Shanghai. Arriving on 27th November, he immediately bought out Preston, Bruell and on 3rd December 1866, established his new House under the name of Butterfield & Swire.

“B&S” began exporting tea and silk to the UK and rapidly acquired agencies for shipping lines, banks and insurance companies, before the end of the century handling Shanghai’s biggest fire insurance business and a sizeable marine and accident portfolio; insurance was a core business for Swire for 130 years. Of primary importance was the Blue Funnel agency – entailing management of all aspects of the line’s affairs in the East – and Swire would retain this role for more than 120 years.

Within 18 months, however, Butterfield had been ousted from the partnership: ‘He was grasping and he bothered me’ wrote John Swire. It would be more than 100 years before the firm finally shed his name; but in common with all foreign traders, John Swire quickly adopted a Chinese name for his “hong” and so it was as Taikoo (太古), meaning “Great and Ancient” that B&S soon came to be better known.

By 1870, Swire had branch offices at Yokohama, Hong Kong, New York and Manchester and the firm’s headquarters had transferred from Liverpool to London. John Swire was soon struck by the potential for steam shipping on the Yangtze: the river provided the only access for foreigners to China’s hinterland and was vital to the movement of people and goods. In 1872, he formed The China Navigation Company (“CNCo”) and ordered three paddle-steamers for the new company, but before these vessels arrived in China, he snapped up a newly bankrupted line, Union Steam Navigation, with assets that included extensive waterfront property at Shanghai and elsewhere. The Union company’s Tunsin thus became the first vessel to sail under CNCo colours in April 1873.

Within a year, John Swire had purchased two coasters for a complementary operation which he called the Coast Boats Ownery. By the time the CBO came under the umbrella of China Navigation in 1883, its charter network extended throughout Southeast Asia and regular services had commenced to Australia, New Zealand and Japan.


The growing diversity of shipping trades encouraged Swire to expand into new businesses. The first of these initiatives was the formation of Taikoo Sugar in 1881. A sugar refinery was built at Quarry Bay on Hong Kong Island and quickly began to fill the holds of CNCo’s ships with raw cane sugar inbound from Java, the Philippines and Taiwan, and refined product destined for markets in China, Japan and Australia. In its day, Taikoo operated the largest and most sophisticated plant in the Asia-Pacific region.

It became increasingly clear that the now sizeable China Navigation fleet needed a reliable in-house repair facility. In 1900, construction work began on Taikoo Dockyard, on land adjoining the sugar refinery. This massive project was carried out under the leadership of James Henry Scott (1845-1912), who succeeded John Samuel Swire as Senior Partner of the firm, on the latter’s death in 1898. Jim Scott, a member of the shipbuilding family, had joined Butterfield & Swire soon after its foundation in 1866 and was John Swire’s trusted righthand. Taikoo Dockyard was one of Hong Kong’s biggest and most progressive employers, providing housing, hospital and a school – which exists to this day.

In 1914, John Swire & Sons became a limited company on the expiration of its original partnership agreement, with John Samuel Swire’s elder son John “Jack” (1861-1933) as its first Chairman. The next two decades saw considerable expansion on the shipping side, under the successive Chairmanships of Jack and of his younger half-brother (George) Warren Swire (1883-1949), who took over the reins in 1927. By this date, CNCo had extended its Yangtze services west to Chongqing, through the turbulent waters of the Three Gorges, and the need to maintain its growing fleet of vessels encouraged a new diversification into paint manufacturing, with the establishment in Shanghai of Orient Paint in 1934.

World War II brought Swire to its knees. More than 30 of vessels were lost to enemy action; the Taikoo Dockyard and Taikoo Sugar Refinery were badly damaged by American bombing. Property throughout China was damaged or destroyed and in London, head office was gutted during the blitz. Following the Communist revolution of 1949, China began to close its doors to the West and Swire was forced to wind up its interests on the Mainland and consolidate its businesses on Hong Kong.

The firm was by now under the Chairmanship of Jack Swire’s son, John “Jock” Kidston Swire (1893-1983), and it is largely thanks to J.K. Swire that its

operations were rebuilt: it took enormous courage to start again at a time when few would have predicted Hong Kong’s future success. By 1950, Taikoo Sugar was back in production and Taikoo Dockyard had launched its first post-war liner for China Navigation.

CNCo turned its attention south to Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, establishing the pattern for the liner services the company operates today. In 1952, as a basis for these shipping interests, Swire opened an office in Sydney and in 1956, as part of a strategy to look for new ventures in Australia, purchased a freezer trucking company known as Frigmobile. It was to be the first of a number of investments in cold storage and specialist road transport, which are Central to Swire’s current Australian portfolio.

Recognising that air transport was the key to the future, Jock Swire was determined to get the firm into aviation – in 1947, channelling part of Taikoo Dockyard’s

rehabilitation energies into developing an aircraft engineering facility. This company, Pacific Air Maintenance & Supply, merged three years later with Jardine Air Maintenance to form Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company (“HAECO”).

In 1948, Jock Swire persuaded the board to expend yet more of the firm's greatly depleted capital on a majority stake in Cathay Pacific Airways. Formed in 1946 by American-Australian partners, Roy Farrell and Sydney de Kantzow with a single US Army surplus DC3 – Betsy – in two years they had enlarged their fleet to six DC-3s and a Catalina flying boat. Under Swire management, Cathay Pacific prospered: by 1959, the airline had acquired its first turboprop aircraft, the Lockheed Electra, and in the same year, gained northbound traffic rights to new markets in Taiwan and Japan; now a truly regional carrier, the airline entered the jet-age with the arrival of its first Convair-880M in 1962. In 1965, Swire purchased Hongkong Bottlers Federal, an American-owned business that held the franchise to bottle Coca-Cola. Hongkong Bottlers offered significant synergy with Swire, since Taikoo Sugar could provide the major ingredients for a soft-drink production business: sugar and water from its reservoirs.

The 1970s were a decade of immense change for Swire. Unable to compete with cheaper producers around the region, Taikoo Sugar closed its refinery in 1972 to concentrate on packaging and distribution. Taikoo Dockyard’s Hong Kong Island site had meanwhile been outgrown by the advent of large container shipping. In 1973, Taikoo merged with former rival Hongkong & Whampoa Dock, as Hongkong United Dockyards (“HUD”), moving to new headquarters at Hong Kong’s container port.

The question of what to do with the vast acreage of the dockyard and refinery sites led to the creation of Swire Properties and the residential estate, Taikoo Shing, and retail/ office complex Cityplaza were the first of a number of prestigious developments that redefined the commercial focus of Hong Kong. In 1974, the shell company left behind by the closure of Taikoo Dockyard became Swire Pacific Limited – a ready-made public holding company for the group’s principal Hong Kong-based assets – while Butterfield’s long-forgotten interest in the firm was finally laid to rest and replaced by a wider use of “John Swire & Sons”, in line with the parent company.

The 1970s saw Swire take a stake in the burgeoning offshore oil and gas industry through the formation of Swire Pacific Offshore in 1975 and the acquisition in 1979 of specialist supplier of offshore equipment, EPD (now Swire Oilfield Services). Shareholdings were also acquired in the Papua New Guinea conglomerate Steamships Trading Company, and in tea trader, James Finlay.

Meanwhile, Cathay Pacific acquired its first long-range Boeing 707 aircraft and then its first widebodied aircraft, the Lockheed TriStar, enabling expansion of its route network outside Asia. In 1976, the airline began flying to Bahrain and in 1980 – following the acquisition of its first Boeing 747-200 – to London. Coming at the end of a long and acrimonious battle for traffic rights, it was seminal moment for Cathay, turning it at long last into a fully-fledged international airline. Elsewhere, this period heralded Swire’s first investments in the USA, where Swire Properties acquired substantial real estate for development in Miami, Swire Coca-Cola obtained its first bottling franchise at Salt Lake City, and, in 1982, freezer warehousing company United States Cold Storage became a wholly owned subsidiary.

In 1985 Swire Properties began development of Pacific Place, its flagship Hong Kong property, helping to formulate the company's ongoing strategy, replicated in Mainland China and the US, of creating strategically located, mixed-use developments connected to major transportation hubs. Swire Pacific meanwhile grew its trading businesses, with the acquisition of the Marathon Sports chain in 1983; retailing and wholesaling of sports and leisure shoes, apparel and equipment, as well as automotive trading, became key elements of its trading division. The 1990s saw major investment in Mainland China, where in partnership with The Coca-Cola Company and the Chinese Government’s foreign investment arm, CITIC, Swire Beverages began to develop soft-drink production facilities, after gaining franchises in seven provinces. Swire’s aeronautical engineering arm, HAECO, also expanded its operations into Mainland China, as a means of offering more competitively-priced services to its customers, forming Taikoo (Xiamen) Aircraft Engineering Company (“TAECO”) in 1993. In partnership with ICI, (which later sold its interest to the AzkoNobel group), Swire also began to manufacture Dulux paint on the Mainland.

Swire increased its stake in the regional aviation market through the 1990s, with shareholdings in Hong Kong airlines Dragonair and all-cargo carrier Air Hong Kong and in 1996, the group realigned Cathay Pacific’s shareholding structure to increase the stake in the airline held by CITIC. This deal was seen as vital to securing Swire’s place in Hong Kong’s aviation industry beyond the 1997 Handover to China.

In Australia, meanwhile, John Swire Sons added to its growing expertise in road transport with the purchase of Victorian bulk haulage operator Kalari in 1994, subsequently expanding the business to offer specialist storage and distribution services nationwide. In the late 1990s, JS&S built on its longstanding presence in Papua New Guinea, to become majority shareholder in national conglomerate, Steamships Trading Company.

In the Year 2000, JS&S increased to 100% its shareholding in long-term associate, James Finlay – a major tea grower and trader with ancillary interests in growing flowers and vegetables for the UK markets. The group subsequently turned Finlays into a leading supplier to the global food and beverage industry of tea, coffee and herbal extracts.

In 2002, Swire Properties signed a joint venture agreement to develop a major commercial and cultural complex in Guangzhou; the next few years would see Swire Properties invest in a succession of ‘anchor’ commercial projects in some of China’s major cities. The company also established Swire Hotels to create and manage a chain of boutique and business hotels in Hong Kong and Mainland China.

In 2006, a further shareholder restructuring saw Cathay Pacific become a strategic partner to China’s flag-carrier, Air China, with a shareholding of just under 20%. Dragonair became a wholly owned subsidiary of Cathay Pacific, operating under its own brand, but with Cathay management; Air China meanwhile acquired shares in Cathay Pacific from both Swire Pacific and CITIC. The first decade of the new century also saw Swire grow its international cold storage interests. In America, United States Cold Storage continued to expand and in Australia, the group merged its interests in the sector under the national umbrella of Swire Cold Storage in 2004. Swire Pacific Cold Storage was formed in 2010 to develop the Mainland China market and was soon constructing the first of 13 large cold stores to be built by 2020, as the basis of a nationwide network.

The last ten years have seen increasing investment in companies with a “green” focus. These diverse businesses include Alex Fraser, Australia’s pioneering construction and demolition waste recycler, and Swire Pacific Offshore subsidiary, Swire Blue Ocean, which installs offshore wind turbines. John Swire & Sons is now a major shareholder in Argent Energy, a UK company which produces biodiesel from waste cooking fat and oil, while Cathay Pacific has a strategic shareholding in a company that has pioneered the conversion of solid waste to bio-jet fuel.

The group has also continued to invest in Mainland China. In addition to its property and aviation interests, Taikoo Sugar has returned to refining there, after a break of over 40 years. China Navigation has just completed a massive fleet renewal programme, with some 40 multipurpose and bulk vessels constructed at Mainland yards, and Swire has increased its stake in China’s food chain, with food distribution businesses and a bakery chain.

Swire today employs more than 136,000 people worldwide. With its diverse international portfolio, the group is a far cry from the trading business that began it all 200 years ago. Nevertheless, with the sixth generation of the Swire family at the helm of John Swire & Sons, it is still very much a family concern.