KMTC Brand Guidelines: Korea Marine Transport, a 1954 Seoul Line and Intra-Asia Boxes

A Seoul shipping company from 1954.

KMTC is the English shorthand for Korea Marine Transport Co., in Korean 고려해운, Goryeo Haeun. The company was founded in 1954, the Busan daily Kookje Shinmun reported in May 2025, describing it as a firm that has grown alongside South Korea’s shipping industry for more than 70 years. Korean Wikipedia places its head office in Jung-gu, in central Seoul, and the trade press usually calls the container business KMTC Line.

Korean Wikipedia describes a company built on cargo routes between Korea, China and Japan and between Korea and Russia, with a regular Korea–Japan container service based at the port of Busan. It lists a group of related companies around the line, among them KMTC Logistics and Korea Ferry.

The trade press gives a measure of its later scale. In May 2022 The Loadstar reported that KMTC Line had been profitable every year since 1985, that it had 156,995 TEU of capacity, ranking it 13th among container carriers, and that it was the largest of South Korea’s privately owned feeder operators. The company credited higher freight rates on its Indian and Persian Gulf services for its 2021 results, the publication added. Its figures came from the 2021 results that all twelve of South Korea’s privately owned feeder operators had released, as Korean law requires of companies above a set asset size, The Loadstar noted.

The company has kept close ties with Korea’s maritime schools. In May 2025 Kookje Shinmun reported that KMTC had awarded industry-academy scholarships to nine students at the maritime college of Korea Maritime and Ocean University in Busan, to be paid twice a year.

From Busan feeders to Port Klang and the Gulf.

KMTC has also invested ashore. In December 2020 Container News reported that KMTC Line and the state-backed Korea Ocean Business Corporation (KOBC) had launched a joint venture, KM Cargo Services, with a container facility at the Northports terminal in Malaysia’s Port Klang. KMTC held 60 per cent and KOBC 40 per cent; the two had agreed on 29 October 2019 to enter Southeast Asia’s ports and logistics market after local feasibility studies, and the publication described Port Klang as one of KMTC’s frequent ports of call and a hub for transhipment cargo.

By 2026 the company was counted among Korea’s deep-sea lines. In May 2026 The Loadstar grouped KMTC Line with HMM and SM Line as South Korea’s “ocean-going” container carriers, set apart from the country’s regional and feeder operators. On 1 November 2026 Container News, citing the analyst DynaLiners, reported that KMTC had signed a contract for six 3,100 TEU container ships at CSSC Huangpu Wenchong Shipbuilding in China. The publication called it the carrier’s first containership newbuilding order placed outside South Korea; the six ships would add a combined 18,600 TEU when delivered, and no delivery schedule had been disclosed.

India Shipping News added detail on 28 October 2026. It reported that the contract was signed in Guangzhou on 26 October 2026 with the yard and China Shipbuilding Trading Co., that it was KMTC’s first order with China State Shipbuilding Corporation, and that the ships would be based on the yard’s own “Honghu,” or Swan, 3,100 TEU design, refined for KMTC’s services. The publication wrote that KMTC had long focused on intra-Asian container shipping and had historically placed most of its newbuilding work with Korean yards, so the order added a new shipbuilding partner; prices and delivery dates were not disclosed.

The record also includes a regulatory case. In January 2022 the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined 23 liner operators over what it found was the fixing of freight rates on routes between South Korea and Southeast Asia from 2003 to 2018, The Loadstar reported. Korea Marine Transport was named among them, alongside HMM, SM Line, Pan Ocean, Sinokor, Maersk, Evergreen and others, and received the largest penalty in the case.

How box lines and ports present themselves.

Container lines, box lessors and port operators sell capacity rather than consumer products, and they present themselves mostly to shippers, carriers, investors and job seekers. Their identities travel on large objects. A line’s colours and name are repeated on hulls, on the containers it owns and on terminal equipment. Corporate photography tends to show ships at sea, stacked containers and cranes over quays, often lit at night.

Websites carry much of the practical work. Carriers publish schedules, route maps and booking or tracking tools; lessors such as Triton run sales portals, product sheets and pages on container conditions; terminal operators list their ports, berths and services. Fleet pages and dated timelines matter a great deal: Seaspan’s site, for example, sets out its history as a year-by-year list of ship deliveries, designs and orders.

Fuel and emissions now have pages of their own. Shipowners and lines describe dual-fuel ships, retrofits and new fuels such as LNG and methanol, usually in their own words and with their own figures, alongside sustainability reports and the certificates and policies they choose to publish. Those pages are statements by the companies, and this guide reports them as such.

Ownership changes often. Many companies in this group were formed by merger, are owned by infrastructure or private-equity investors, or are partly held by the carriers they serve, and their annual reports, preference shares and investor pages remain public even after a take-private. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it was founded, who owns it and how it describes its business — and marks clearly what rests only on its own word.

Four letters and a Korean name.

The brand appears in two forms. In English it is KMTC, or KMTC Line in trade-press usage, and Korea Marine Transport Co., Ltd. in full; in Korean it is 고려해운, romanised as Goryeo Haeun. The four letters are shared with unrelated organisations, among them the Kenya Medical Training College and a radio station in Arkansas, so the full company name, Korea Marine Transport, is the one that identifies the shipping line.

In the trade press its story is one of routes, ports and ships: a Busan-based Korea–Japan container service, Indian and Persian Gulf services that the company credited for its 2021 results, a depot venture at Port Klang run with a state-backed Korean finance body, and a 2026 order for a class of 3,100 TEU ships from a Chinese yard.

For a design guide, KMTC shows how a long-established line can carry the same short name from feeder routes to deep-sea services across seven decades. Compare SITC, an intra-Asia container line named in the same 2022 case, and Evergreen Marine, another East Asian container line. For this guide we use a brick red, a charcoal and a slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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