The history of Swire Group in Hong Kong began 146 years ago
John Samuel Swire launched the business from his home in Liverpool in the 1860s, and expanded to Shanghai in 1866
The story of Swire Group’s business in Hong Kong began when an ambitious British entrepreneur, John Samuel Swire, decided to expand his modest import-export business, then known as John Swire & Sons, from his home in Liverpool to China in the 1860s.
It opened its first mainland office in Shanghai exactly 150 years ago this year, in 1866, under the name of Butterfield & Swire. Four years later, it established an office in Hong Kong with businesses ranging from shipbuilding to sugar refining, retaining the Butterfield name until the 1970s even though the partnership between John Swire and Richard Butterfield had been dissolved in 1868.
Swire’s Chinese name is Taikoo, which loosely translates as ‘great and ancient.’ The name was selected by Thomas Taylor Meadows, the British consul in Shanghai at the time when Swire set up its business in the city.
The company grew along with the then colony of Hong Kong, expanding its dockyard and sugar refining businesses, but endured a torrid time in the second world war, when most of its Hong Kong facilities were destroyed. It took until 1950 to get the sugar plant and dockyard back into production.
Peace allowed for the renewed expansion of the shipping business, but with an eye to the future Swire began diversifying into aviation in the 1940s and in 1948 it acquired a majority stake in Cathay Pacific Airways. In 1980, Cathay acquired its first Boeing 747-200 for flights to London, turning it into a fully fledged international airline.