DKSH Brand Guidelines: Three Swiss Trading Houses in Asia, Merged in Zurich in 2002

Three Swiss merchants in three Asian ports.

DKSH stands for Diethelm Keller Siber Hegner, and each name is a nineteenth-century Swiss trading house in Asia. German Wikipedia, citing a company-published history and a 2009 book by the former chief executive Jörg Wolle, says the three founders went east independently in the 1860s: Hermann Siber to Japan, Eduard Anton Keller to the Philippines and Wilhelm Heinrich Diethelm to Singapore.

The oldest of the three firms is Siber & Brennwald, founded in Yokohama in autumn 1865. A company history by Claus Nscheler says its founders were Caspar Brennwald, then 27, and Hermann Siber, 23. Brennwald had visited Japan in 1863 and 1864 with the first Swiss trade delegation and served as Swiss consul while he traded. swissinfo.ch reported in 2012 that the firm was set up to sell Swiss cloth and watches in Japan and ship Japanese silk the other way; the company history adds silkworm eggs, saltpetre and even ships to the early trade.

The other two houses grew out of existing firms. According to German Wikipedia, Keller joined C. Lutz & Co., founded in Manila in 1866, in 1868, took it over and renamed it Ed. A. Keller & Co. in 1887. Diethelm joined Hooglandt & Co., founded in Singapore in 1860, in 1871, and renamed it Diethelm & Co. in the same year, 1887. All three firms later moved their head offices to Switzerland while keeping their business in Asia.

Earthquake, war and recovery.

The Japanese firm changed its name with its partners: Siber, Wolff & Co. from 1900 and Siber, Hegner & Co. from 1910, the company history says. It opened branches in Osaka in 1906, Kobe in 1907 and Tokyo in 1917, then in Shanghai’s foreign concession in 1921 and in Tianjin and Beijing in the 1930s.

The Great Kanto earthquake of 1 September 1923 destroyed the firm’s offices and warehouses in Yokohama and Tokyo, together with its books and stock, according to the same history. By 1930 the firm faced financial collapse; it recovered with new backers, including Credit Suisse, and turned from a partnership into a limited company.

The company history says the Second World War forced most of Siber Hegner’s branches to stop trading between 1939 and 1945, but did no lasting damage. A March 2026 article on the Swiss National Museum blog, which names Siber-Hegner among the firms at the forefront of Swiss–Japanese trade, describes the wider setting: Japanese authorities came to treat Europeans as a possible “fifth column,” the Swiss community in Japan shrank, and Switzerland represented the interests of 16 countries in Japan as a neutral power.

After the war, the history says, Siber Hegner opened in Hong Kong in 1947, ran branches in Dakar, Abidjan and Bamako from its French offices until the early 1960s, and did well in Japan selling Swiss machines and Omega watches, an agency it had held since early in the century. It then diversified into chemicals and pharmaceuticals and founded Siber Hegner Holding, turning its East Asian branches into separate limited companies.

The Diethelm and Keller businesses stayed close for generations but only combined in the summer of 2000, as Diethelm Keller Holding, German Wikipedia says. In 2002 Siber Hegner Holding joined them, creating DKSH Holding.

Design and documentation.

Pharmaceutical wholesalers sit between the companies that make medicines and the pharmacies, hospitals and clinics that hand them out, so their public image is mostly an image of movement. The pictures these companies tend to show are long automated warehouse aisles, conveyor lines carrying plastic totes, and high racks of shelving, with staff in high-visibility vests picking orders between them. The aim of that imagery is to show scale and order rather than any single product.

The second recurring scene is the road. Fleets of liveried vans and temperature-controlled trucks carry the company name through towns and onto motorways and are often the most visible sign of a wholesaler on the street. Close-ups of insulated cold-chain boxes, data loggers and handheld barcode scanners carry the same message at a smaller size: goods are tracked from shelf to doorstep.

The third scene is the pharmacy counter. Because many wholesalers also run pharmacy networks, franchise banners or buying groups, their brochures often show a pharmacist behind a counter talking with a customer, which gives a logistics business a human face. These banners usually carry their own names and colours, separate from the parent company, so one wholesaler can stand behind several identities on the high street.

Beyond that, the visual record is corporate: trade-fair stands, investor presentations and annual reports with supply-chain diagrams of arrows linking factories, distribution centres and pharmacies. For a design study, the useful question is how one identity can work on a lorry side, a carton label, a pharmacy sign and a screen at the same time.

The “silent giant” goes public.

DKSH describes its work as market expansion services: it markets, sells and distributes other companies’ products, mainly in Asia. English Wikipedia says it is organised into four business units — Consumer Goods, Healthcare, Performance Materials and Technology — and that Healthcare is the largest. The company says its healthcare unit handles pharmaceuticals, consumer health and over-the-counter products, and medical devices in 17 Asia-Pacific markets and Switzerland, with product licensing and manufacturing through Medinova and Favorex.

For years the group kept a low profile. In February 2012 swissinfo.ch reported that Swiss media had called it the “silent giant” as it prepared to list its shares. DKSH joined the SIX Swiss Exchange on 20 March 2012, English Wikipedia says. The founding families stayed on: German Wikipedia gives Diethelm Keller Holding a stake of 45 percent as of November 2023.

Since the listing the group has kept buying and selling businesses. German Wikipedia records the Swiss watchmaker Maurice Lacroix in 2011, a majority of PT Wicaksana in Indonesia in 2017, the sale of the China healthcare business in 2018, and Auric Pacific’s Malaysian and Singaporean business in 2019; English Wikipedia adds Axieo in Australia and New Zealand in 2020 and Terra Firma in North America in 2022. Stefan P. Butz succeeded Jörg Wolle as chief executive in 2017, and Marco Gadola chairs the board. In 2020 the company set its purpose as “enriching people’s lives,” and in 2025 it marked 160 years since the founding of Siber & Brennwald.

For a design guide, DKSH shows how a company can carry four family names in one short initialism while its history stays tied to the ports where they started. Compare Zuellig Pharma, another healthcare distributor in Asia, and PHOENIX group. For this guide we use harbour navy, silk gold and rice paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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