Launching of Chekiang at Taikoo Dockyard in 1957.

The China Navigation Company’s parent company, John Swire & Sons Limited, has its origins in a small Liverpool trading house founded in 1816. In 1866, John Samuel Swire (1825-1898) opened his first Far Eastern agency in Shanghai, and in 1872 he founded The China Navigation Company to operate a modest fleet of paddle steamers on China’s Yangtze River.

Within a decade, CNCo had expanded its operations up and down the China coast and had begun regular services to Australia and New Zealand. One of the company’s early successes was to take a monopoly of the previously junk-borne tramp trade in “beancake” – cartwheel-sized cakes of compressed soybean husk (the residue from making oil), which were carried from North to South China to use as a fertiliser. By the turn of the century, CNCo’s by then substantial fleet was covering a complex network of Far Eastern trades, backed up by its own well-established coastal and river feeder services.

A Butterfield and Swire 1950's advert published in Hong Kong

After World War II, CNCo began to pioneer ‘new’ trading routes from Australia to Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands - a region that is now the focus for CNCo’s owned and managed trades.

In the 1960s, the company introduced a revolutionary new method of cargo carrying to these Pacific trades: “unitisation” involved palletised cargo carried in specially adapted ships fitted with side ports and worked with forklift trucks carried on board, and was ideally suited to island ports where shore facilities were minimal. In the late 1970s, CNCo repeated the trick by upgrading these services to full containerisation, using self-geared vessels fitted with mobile gantry cranes – an innovative approach at that time.

The 1960s and 70s also saw China Navigation diversifying its scope of activities in two other very different directions. The first was passenger cruising, based in Australia and New Zealand, and commencing from 1961. In the early 1970s, CNCo developed a niche market operating seminar cruises out of Japan and successfully dominated this market for almost 20 years. The early 1970s also saw CNCo beginning to invest seriously in the dry bulk carrier market – a move that marked the company’s first departure from a traditional owner/operator role to that of ship manager, with a succession of vessels, ranging from Handymax to Capesize, chartered into some of the world’s leading bulk pools.

The mid-1980s saw another new departure for CNCo, and the beginning of a highly successful, decade-long involvement in the VLCC market, with two owned and managed vessels traded on long-term charter to oil majors, helping the company to further diversify its expertise.

In the 1990s, CNCo expanded into the trans-Tasman trade, where the company acquired a majority shareholding in New Zealand-headquartered Tasman Orient Line. The move would see the company upgrade its fleet with larger, multipurpose vessels to accommodate a range of bulk cargoes and an expanding service network.

In 1999, CNCo moved into bulk logistics with a contract to supply and operate a sophisticated floating storage and transhipment platform to handle export copper concentrate for Ok Tedi Mining Limited in Papua New Guinea – an ongoing and highly successful charter.

Miho jumboisation project, 2005/06, Wenchong, China

2003 was a landmark year for CNCo, when the company acquired Andrew Weir’s Bank Line, which offered a round-the-world service linking Europe with the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia, and Oldendorff’s Indotrans Service, which connected Southeast Asia with India, Saudi Arabia, Canada and the USA. A year later, CNCo extended the Indotrans offering with Indotrans Pacific, linking Australia and New Zealand with Canada and the USA.

Today these services form a part of CNCo’s Swire Shipping service, which provides comprehensive port-to-port coverage throughout the Asia Pacific region and to North America, Europe, the Middle East and India with a fleet of sophisticated, well-maintained vessels offering a range of break-bulk, project, container and bulk options. China Navigation’s other managed services include Tasman Orient Line, connecting New Zealand, Fiji and New Caledonia with Asia Pacific ports, New Guinea Pacific Line, linking Southeast Asian and South Pacific ports, and Greater Bali Hai, linking Japan and Korea with the South Pacific.

The China Navigation Company has more than 135 years of growth and experience behind it and we’re very proud of our history as the Swire group’s oldest operational company.