Guotai Haitong Brand Guidelines: Guotai Junan, Haitong & a 2025 Merger in Shanghai

Two 1992 brokers, one 1999 merger.

Guotai Haitong Securities, often shortened to GTHT, is a Shanghai securities firm whose name joins two older ones. Its main line runs back to 1992, when two brokers were founded: Guotai Securities in Shanghai and Junan Securities in Shenzhen. Chinese Wikipedia says Guotai was one of three large securities companies approved that year, alongside Huaxia Securities in Beijing and Nanfang Securities in Shenzhen, and that Junan was set up by five state-owned enterprises. English and Chinese Wikipedia give different founding days for both — 10 or 25 September for Guotai, 25 August or 12 October for Junan — but agree on the year.

On 18 August 1999 the two merged to form Guotai Junan Securities, known in English as GTJA. English Wikipedia lists the licences that followed: business under the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor scheme in 2003, Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor status in 2007 and introducing-broker business in 2008. In 2010 its Hong Kong subsidiary, Guotai Junan International Holdings, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; Chinese Wikipedia dates the listing to 8 July 2010 and says it was the first Chinese securities firm to list in Hong Kong by initial public offering. In March 2011, English Wikipedia says, the subsidiary joined the Hang Seng Composite Index.

Ownership was settled in 2011. To meet a rule that a single controller could hold control of only one securities firm, Chinese Wikipedia says, Shanghai International Group and Central Huijin swapped holdings: Shanghai International Group took control of Guotai Junan, while Central Huijin kept control of Shenyin Wanguo Securities. In the classification of securities companies published by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Guotai Junan was rated AA in 2016 and again in 2021, the same source says. The codes the merged company uses today are 601211 in Shanghai and 2611 in Hong Kong, according to Chinese Wikipedia.

Haitong Securities, 1988–2025.

The second name comes from Haitong Securities, a securities firm founded in 1988, English Wikipedia says. It offered stock and futures brokerage, investment banking, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions advice, asset management, mutual funds and private equity. Haitong listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in July 2007 and, after a December 2011 attempt was called off because of market conditions, began trading in Hong Kong on 27 April 2012. In 2015 it completed the purchase of BESI, the investment-banking business of the Portuguese bank Novo Banco. By mid-2020, English Wikipedia says, it was among China’s four largest securities firms, with CITIC Securities, Guotai Junan and GF Securities.

The combination was announced on 5 September 2024, when Guotai Junan said it would merge with Haitong, according to Chinese Wikipedia. China Daily reported on 8 November 2024 that the Shanghai municipal government had approved the merger and restructuring, and that the city’s state-owned assets commission would guide the equity transactions, the registration of the name change and the integration of the two businesses. The paper placed the deal in a wider wave of consolidation encouraged by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, which had said in March 2024 that it would nurture about ten leading securities firms; it counted at least seven restructuring cases among brokers that year.

The national regulator then cleared the structure. AAStocks Financial News reported in January 2025 that the CSRC had, on 17 January, approved the registration for Guotai Junan to absorb Haitong by issuing new shares, and that on completion Haitong Securities would be dissolved and its branches would become branches of Guotai Junan. English Wikipedia says Haitong’s A and H shares were delisted from Shanghai and Hong Kong on 4 March 2025 and that the merger was completed in April 2025.

Brokers, insurers and their wordmarks.

China’s large insurers and securities firms are mostly listed groups with sizeable state shareholders, and many trade in more than one market, typically Shanghai or Shenzhen alongside Hong Kong, and in a few cases London. Their brands therefore have to work in at least two scripts. A full Chinese company name usually sits beside a shorter Chinese form and a set of English initials, as with PICC and 人保, or CPIC and 太保, and designers need all three versions to stay recognisable together.

The visual language this guide looks at includes wordmarks in reds, blues and golds, lettering with roots in Chinese calligraphy, and square, seal-like symbols that echo a traditional name chop. Websites and reports commonly pair those marks with photography of office towers and city skylines, and with images of the people and places the companies serve.

The products shape the pages. Insurers organise their sites around life, property, health and pension cover, policy and claims services and branch finders, while securities firms present brokerage, investment banking, asset management and the wealth apps through which retail investors trade. Group sites often link out to separate websites for each subsidiary, each carrying the parent’s initials.

Much of the most carefully designed material is financial reporting. Annual and interim reports, results presentations and ESG or sustainability reports are published in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English for investors on several exchanges, and they set the tone that the rest of a brand often follows. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it was founded, who owns it and where it is listed — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A new name under an older symbol.

The new name arrived in stages. Chinese Wikipedia says the shares issued for the merger began trading on 17 March 2025 while the stock’s short name stayed unchanged, and that on the evening of 16 March Guotai Junan announced it planned to become Guotai Haitong Securities Co., Ltd., with pre-approval from the national market regulator. Haitong’s customer hotline was folded into Guotai Junan’s from 7 April 2025. The Shanghai market regulator approved the new name on 3 April 2025, and on 11 April 2025 the company began trading under it on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and was formally inaugurated, the same source says. Chinese Wikipedia also describes the deal as the first merger between leading brokers since China’s new “Nine Articles” capital-market guidelines, and as the largest in the global securities industry in more than a decade.

The rename continued through the group. Chinese Wikipedia says the Hong Kong holding company, Guotai Junan Financial Holdings, was renamed Guotai Haitong Financial Holdings in December 2025; other subsidiaries it lists include an asset manager, a futures business, Shanghai Securities and the fund manager Huaan Fund. The old web address gtja.com now forwards to gtht.com. English Wikipedia describes Guotai Haitong as China’s largest securities brokerage by asset value since the Haitong acquisition.

The symbol stayed the same. According to Chinese Wikipedia, the merged company kept Guotai Junan’s blue diamond-shaped symbol for the time being, because no satisfactory new design had been found in the short term and registering a trademark takes time. The Chinese name, 国泰海通, joins the first two characters of each predecessor’s name, and the English initials GTHT follow the pattern of GTJA.

For a design guide, Guotai Haitong shows a merged company that changed its name first and left its symbol for later. Compare CITIC Securities and Huatai Securities, two other Chinese securities firms. For this guide we use a deep blue, a slate and a pale silver with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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