Loscam Brand Guidelines: The 1942 Melbourne Pallet Pool Now Run From Hong Kong

Four families, wooden pallets and a set of initials.

Loscam traces its start to 1942 in Australia. The company says it was founded that year by the Labouska, Taylor, Cook and Coy families and registered as LTC. Its own timeline is the main source for these early years, so the details below are given as the company tells them.

According to that timeline, LTC branded its pallets with hot irons rather than paint in 1952, and between 1955 and 1957 it began making and hiring out wooden pallets from premises in Port Melbourne. In 1957 it was renamed Loscam Trading Pty Ltd, a name the company says was built from the initials of the founding members’ surnames. The same year, it says, its pallets were coloured a rich reddish-brown and carried a white logo.

The hire network then spread across Australia. Loscam says it opened its first depots in Sydney and Brisbane in 1962, extended into South Australia in 1975 and took on premises in Dandenong, in Victoria, the same year. In 1987, it says, Loscam was listed as a public company.

The 1990s took the business out of Australia. The company dates its first plastic pallet, sourced from an Australian manufacturer, and its first pallet built to the Asian ECR standard to 1993. It says it entered Singapore and Malaysia in 1994, Thailand in 1995, Indonesia and Hong Kong in 1996, and the Philippines in 2001. In 2006, by its account, it bought two pallet rental businesses, DEPCO in Thailand and Tawi in the Philippines, entered Vietnam, and set up in mainland China as a wholly foreign-owned company.

Pooled, red, and spread across Asia-Pacific.

Loscam’s business is pooling: it hires out pallets and other equipment for use in its customers’ supply chains. The company describes itself as a provider of “pooling and returnable packaging solutions,” operating in 13 regions across the Asia-Pacific, from Australia and New Zealand to Greater China and Southeast Asia. Its equipment is tracked through its own online platform, Loscam Online, the company says.

Colour is part of how the press has described the business. When China Merchants Group bought the business in 2010, PortNews reported that Loscam’s pallets were painted red, against the blue of its larger Australian rival Brambles; the same report called Loscam Australia’s second-largest supplier of wooden pallets. The company’s own timeline describes reddish-brown pallets with a white logo from 1957.

The range grew well beyond the wooden pallet. Loscam’s timeline lists plastic bins, collars and lids from 1995; the Gpak stillage, which it says it took into the automotive aftermarket in 1997; the IBC i6 bulk container, launched in 2012; the IBC i8, launched in 2015; and the Active Lock foldable produce crate, introduced in New Zealand in 2013. It also lists plastic pallets for China from 2012, pallet cages from 2014 and a new generation of the Gpak, the G5, redesigned in 2022.

The company also describes a run of new depots: a “Super Depot” at Truganina, west of Melbourne, opened in December 2011; another in Thailand in 2015; and one in Greater China in 2019. It says it began operating in New Zealand in 2012, launched a trans-Tasman pallet service between the two countries, entered Myanmar in 2016 and Taiwan in 2017, and started a branch in Cambodia, run from Vietnam, in 2024. In June 2025 it opened a depot in Mangere, Auckland, and in March 2026 it marked 20 years in Vietnam with a new automated depot in Binh Duong, according to its own news pages.

Pools, crates and returnable packaging.

Pallet pooling and returnable packaging companies sell something unusual: the use of an object rather than the object itself. A pool operator owns pallets, crates or containers, hires them to manufacturers and growers, and collects them again after delivery. One example is CHEP, whose pallets are rented rather than sold, ABC Radio National noted in 2014, so the company keeps ownership of each one through its working life.

Because the equipment keeps moving between companies, colour does much of the identifying work. Cabinet magazine described in 2014 how CHEP’s blue pallets, stencilled “Property of CHEP,” stand out among plain timber pallets in American yards, alongside red pallets belonging to a smaller rental company, PECO. In the produce trade the recognisable object is the folding plastic crate: reusable plastic containers, or RPCs, that travel from the grower to the supermarket, often serve as the display on the shop floor, and fold flat for the return trip, as English Wikipedia describes IFCO’s system.

Behind the coloured equipment sits a network of depots and service centres where pallets and crates are inspected, repaired, washed and sent out again. English Wikipedia, citing Brambles’ 2025 results, puts CHEP’s network at more than 750 service centres; IFCO calls its own wash-and-return loop the SmartCycle. Alongside the pool operators are manufacturers of plastic pallets, bulk boxes and reusable crates.

The sector meets at intralogistics and materials-handling fairs, among them LogiMAT at the Stuttgart Trade Fair Centre and ProMat in Chicago. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, and what it says about its products — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From private equity to China Merchants and four shareholders.

Loscam’s ownership has changed several times. AVCJ, the Asian private-equity journal, reported in July 2010 that Affinity Equity Partners had bought around 77% of the business in 2005 from DB Capital Partners. In 2010, after months of negotiation that replaced a possible stock-market listing, Affinity sold to China Merchants Group, which PortNews described as a government-owned port operator, which took more than 90%, according to AVCJ; senior managers kept a minority stake, PortNews reported. AVCJ said Loscam would be run as an autonomous business and was China Merchants’ first move into pallet pooling. At the time the company was based in Melbourne.

In 2011, Loscam says, its corporate office moved to Hong Kong. At the end of 2018 the company announced two new strategic shareholders, CITIC Capital and FountainVest Partners, in a release republished by Modern Materials Handling; it said Sinotrans remained the major shareholder, and the business was then styled China Merchants Loscam.

The latest change came in 2025. Sinotrans announced in June that it would sell a 25% stake, held through China Merchants Shipping, to Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi investment company. On 22 October 2025 Mubadala confirmed the deal was complete: Mubadala and Trustar Capital now each hold 30% of Loscam International, and FountainVest and Sinotrans 20% each. The law firm Latham & Watkins, which advised on the sale, described it in November 2025 as a partial sale by Trustar Capital, FountainVest and Sinotrans. Mubadala called it its first co-control investment in Asia’s industrial sector.

Today the website names the parent as Loscam International Holdings, headquartered in Hong Kong, and the company says it appointed Daniel Bunnett as chief executive in December 2025.

For a design guide, Loscam shows how the colour of the equipment itself can work as an identity. Compare CHEP, another pallet pooling business, and IFCO, a pooling business for returnable crates. For this guide we use a deep pallet red, a dark brown and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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