ICBC Leasing Brand Guidelines: A 2007 Tianjin Bank Lessor & a Hong Kong Aircraft Arm

A bank’s leasing company, set up in 2007.

ICBC Leasing is the leasing company of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Its formal name is ICBC Financial Leasing Co., Ltd., and in Chinese it is 工银金融租赁有限公司, shortened to 工银租赁 or 工银金租; the second short form is also the title of its website. Chinese Wikipedia says it was established on 28 November 2007, is registered in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, the port city east of Beijing, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of ICBC.

Its place in Chinese finance is specific. Chinese Wikipedia describes it as the first financial leasing company to come from the banking system, set up as a State Council pilot and approved to open by the China Banking Regulatory Commission. In a March 2018 release, Invest Hong Kong, the Hong Kong government’s investment-promotion agency, likewise called it “the first bank-affiliated financial leasing company approved by the China Banking Regulatory Commission.”

Its parent is the older institution. English Wikipedia says ICBC was created in January 1984 from the commercial banking operations of the People’s Bank of China, and was listed on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges at the same time on 27 October 2006, about a year before the leasing company was set up. Although the leasing company is registered in Tianjin, China Daily described it in 2018 as based in Beijing, where its parent bank has its headquarters.

Aircraft, ships and equipment.

Aircraft are the most visible part of the business, but not the only part. Invest Hong Kong described ICBC Leasing in 2018 as engaged in aviation, maritime and equipment leasing, and as one of the biggest leasing companies in mainland China by asset value and market share; in aviation, the agency said, its fleet ranked among the top players in the world by number and value of aircraft.

Its aircraft work rests on leases and finance for airlines. In February 2012 Aviation Week reported that ICBC Leasing had ordered International Aero Engines V2500 engines for 15 new Airbus A320-family aircraft. On 29 September 2018 China Daily reported the delivery of the third of four new Airbus A350-900 aircraft to Qatar Airways on a long-term operating lease. It was the company’s 350th aircraft in service, and the ninth wide-body aircraft it had delivered to that airline, which the company’s chief executive called a long-term customer. By September 2018, the paper reported, ICBC Leasing had served 78 customers in 37 countries and regions and owned and managed 670 aircraft, and was “the largest aircraft leasing company in China in terms of fleet value.”

In 2018 the company also gave its aircraft business a separate home. On 28 March 2018 Invest Hong Kong announced that ICBC Leasing had opened a wholly owned subsidiary, ICBC Aviation Leasing Company Limited, in Hong Kong. The release said the new company would bring together ICBC Leasing’s mainland and overseas aircraft leasing business, and set out the aim of making it a sales platform for mainland-made aircraft and a partner of choice for mainland airlines.

The release linked the opening to a change in Hong Kong law. A dedicated tax regime for qualifying aircraft lessors and leasing managers was enacted on 7 July 2017, halving the profits tax rate for qualifying activity, and ICBC Leasing had closed an aircraft leasing deal under the new regime at the end of 2017, the release said.

How lessors present themselves.

Aircraft lessors sell nothing to the travelling public. They buy commercial jets, lease them to airlines and sell them on, so their identities are built for airlines, lenders and investors rather than passengers. Their websites tend to open with a short line of figures — aircraft owned and managed, airline customers, countries — dated to the end of a reporting quarter, as Aircastle and Aviation Capital Group both do.

The aircraft themselves carry other companies’ colours. A lessor’s jet flies in its customer’s livery, so the photographs on lessors’ sites and in their press releases show airlines’ paint schemes rather than the lessor’s own. Aviation Capital Group announced in September 2026, for example, that it had delivered the first Boeing 737-8 in Trinity Airways’ new identity. Fleet pages list aircraft by type, and order-book pages count commitments from the manufacturers years ahead.

Customer pages are often walls of airline logos, sometimes grouped by region, and services pages explain the business in plain terms: operating leases, sale-and-leaseback deals in which a lessor buys an airline’s new aircraft and leases it back, trading in mid-life aircraft, and managing aircraft for other owners. Engines are a business of their own; trade reports describe lessors balancing engine use across their fleets, and some groups plan to expand into engine leasing.

Many of these companies are owned by banks, trading houses or investment firms, and their investor pages — results, fact sheets, credit ratings and bond reports — carry as much weight as the leasing pages. For the guides in this group we use navy, teal and silver tones with sans and serif stand-ins, an unofficial interpretation chosen for a finance-led sector; no company’s logo, livery or photograph is reproduced.

A bank’s initials plus one plain word.

The ICBC Leasing name works as an extension of its parent’s. In English it pairs the bank’s four-letter initialism with a single word for the business, and in Chinese both short forms begin with 工银, the opening characters of the company’s full name. Publications have used the short English form for more than a decade, from Aviation Week in 2012 to China Daily in 2018, while the Hong Kong government’s 2018 release gave the formal name first, ICBC Financial Leasing Co Ltd, with “ICBC Leasing” in brackets.

The 2018 Hong Kong subsidiary carries the same pattern one step further: ICBC Aviation Leasing keeps the bank’s initials and names the line of business. Its launch was a public event. Invest Hong Kong called ICBC Leasing one of its strategic clients and said staff at its headquarters and its Beijing office had followed the project closely; at the opening, the chairman of ICBC said the Asia-Pacific market had kept its momentum and that mainland China’s aircraft lessors formed a growing cluster, and the release presented the new company as part of Hong Kong’s aim to become an aircraft leasing hub for the region.

For a design guide, ICBC Leasing shows how a bank-owned lessor can borrow its parent’s initials and add one plain word for what it does. Compare BOC Aviation and CDB Aviation, two other aircraft lessors whose names begin with the initials of a Chinese bank. For this guide we use a lacquer red, a runway grey and a pale silk with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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