HK Electric Brand Guidelines: Hong Kong’s 1889 Light Company, North Point & Lamma

An 1889 company and fifty street lamps.

HK Electric is the trading name of The Hongkong Electric Company, Limited, which Chinese Wikipedia, citing the company’s own history, says was incorporated on 24 January 1889 and offered its shares to the public. A year earlier the Hong Kong government had signed the city’s first electricity supply contract with it, to power pumps lifting water to residents of Victoria Peak, the same source says. English Wikipedia credits the businessman Sir Catchick Paul Chater with raising the finance; he remained a director of the company for 37 years.

The lights came on at 6pm on 1 December 1890, when the first 50 street lamps were lit in Central; English Wikipedia names Queen’s Road Central, Battery Path and Upper Albert Road. The first power station stood on Star Street in Wan Chai. Chinese Wikipedia says the neighbouring Sun, Moon and Star streets take their names from a line of the Three Character Classic about the “three lights,” a nod to the light that electricity brought. The Wan Chai station closed in 1922. Its successor at North Point began generating in 1918, according to Chinese Wikipedia, or 1919, according to English Wikipedia, and Electric Road and Power Street there are named after it, Chinese Wikipedia says.

Supply spread across the island. By 1905 the company was powering 15 lifts as well as lamps and street lighting, English Wikipedia says, and large users that had made their own electricity, including Dairy Farm, the Peak Tram and the University of Hong Kong, switched to its supply.

The war years reached the company directly. The North Point plant was caught up in the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in December 1941, English Wikipedia says. Chinese Wikipedia says the North Point station stopped generating in 1944 because of fuel shortages and severe damage, and started again after repairs on 4 October 1945.

From North Point to Lamma.

After the war the company moved its generation away from the city in stages. A station at Ap Lei Chau brought its first 60-megawatt unit into service in 1968 and closed in December 1989; the site is now surrounded by the South Horizons housing estate, Chinese and English Wikipedia say. In September 1978 the government approved a coal-fired station at Po Lo Tsui on Lamma Island, whose first unit began generating in 1982, Chinese Wikipedia says; since 1990 all of the company’s generators have been at Lamma, English Wikipedia says.

Lamma is also the site of the company’s wind and solar projects. Lamma Winds, a single 800-kilowatt turbine, opened on 23 February 2006, and Chinese Wikipedia says the site has become a visitor attraction on the island. In July 2010 the company commissioned a thin-film solar system on the roofs of the station’s main building, English Wikipedia says.

The company supplies Hong Kong Island, Ap Lei Chau and Lamma, Chinese Wikipedia says, and since 1981 its network has been linked to CLP’s by a 132-kilovolt cable between North Point and Hung Hom, so that each company can support the other in an emergency. On 9 April 2026 a fault on an interconnection circuit between the two companies caused a brief voltage dip at about 9.22am, after which supply voltage returned to normal; HK Electric apologised, RTHK reported.

How Asian utilities present themselves.

Electricity utilities in Asia rarely sell a product people can hold, so their public image is built from places and services. The most common picture is the city at night: a skyline of lit towers seen across a harbour, offered as proof that the supply works. Out of town the pictures change to substations, transmission pylons striding over paddy fields and hills, and power stations set on coasts and islands.

Much of the visible design work now sits on screens. Customer-service apps and web pages handle accounts, bills, payments and outage notices, and many utilities also run electric-vehicle charging services and reward schemes inside the same apps. The bill itself is a design object: a page of tariffs, fuel charges and usage graphs that households read every billing period.

Campaigns are the other public face. Energy-saving drives, school programmes and community events give a utility a friendlier voice than its engineering does, and they often carry the brand into kitchens, classrooms and housing estates. Alongside them sit transition plans, with dates for running down coal-fired units, adding gas, wind or solar capacity and reaching longer-term climate targets, usually presented as timelines and charts.

The most complete record of how these companies see themselves is often the annual report. For listed and state-owned utilities alike it gathers the plants, the networks, the customer numbers and the plans in one document, with photography and typography chosen to match. The guides in this group look at the history behind each name, and at how that history shows up in the way the company presents itself today.

A holding company renamed, a utility spun off.

The ownership changed in the 1980s. The group listed in Hong Kong in 1976 as Hongkong Electric Holdings, Chinese Wikipedia says; Hongkong Land bought the company in 1981 (English Wikipedia gives its stake as 34 percent), and in 1985 it sold it to Hutchison Whampoa, part of Li Ka-shing’s group, and the listed company kept the Hongkong Electric name. On 16 February 2011 that holding company changed its English name to Power Assets Holdings, while the HK Electric brand stayed with the utility, the same source says.

In January 2014 Power Assets spun off the Hong Kong business. HK Electric Investments, a trust that issues share stapled units, listed on the Hong Kong exchange on 29 January 2014, Chinese Wikipedia says; earlier that month State Grid International Development agreed to subscribe for 18 percent, and Power Assets kept about 42 percent at listing. English Wikipedia says Power Assets later reduced its holding through further share sales, the most recent in June 2015, and names Power Assets, State Grid, CK Infrastructure and the Qatar Investment Authority among the utility’s owners.

The brand also appears in community campaigns. In May 2025 HK Electric and Maxim’s Group launched a food-conservation cooking competition, “All you can cook!” x “Happy green campaign,” open to Hong Kong residents in family, school and public categories, with entries judged on originality, taste, presentation and how well they reduced food waste, and winning recipes collected in an e-cookbook, Marketing-Interactive reported.

For a design guide, HK Electric shows how a nineteenth-century company name can outlast changes of owner by staying with the utility rather than the holding company. Compare CLP, its Kowloon counterpart, and HKEX, the exchange where HK Electric Investments is listed. For this guide we use a navy, a pale granite and a copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HK Electric’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.