SeaCube Brand Guidelines: A 1993 Reefer Lessor, Ontario Teachers’ & Wren House

A refrigerated-container lessor from New Jersey.

SeaCube Container Leasing dates itself to 1993. The company’s website says it was “born in 1993” to serve as a primary provider of refrigerated container leasing, and a 2019 profile in American Shipper, published by FreightWaves, described the business as having grown over the previous 26 years into a major lessor of refrigerated containers, known in the trade as reefers, and of gensets, the diesel generators that power reefers when they are away from ship or port electricity.

The company has moved around northern New Jersey. When Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan announced its agreement to buy SeaCube in January 2013, it described the lessor as based in Park Ridge, New Jersey, with seven offices worldwide. The 2019 American Shipper profile placed the headquarters in Woodcliff Lake. Today the company’s website gives its global headquarters as Montvale, New Jersey, and says it has more than 100 employees in seven offices and more than 200 depots.

The business itself is plain to describe. SeaCube says it leases, finances, buys, sells and manages intermodal equipment, the boxes that move goods by ship, rail and road. Its equipment pages cover refrigerated containers, dry containers, gensets and ISO tanks. Ontario Teachers’ 2013 announcement summarised the principal activities as the acquisition, leasing, re-leasing and later sale of refrigerated and dry containers and generator sets, leased mainly under long-term contracts to shipping lines. The company also runs an asset management service, handling fleet operations, reporting and disposal for third-party container owners, according to its overview page.

The weight of the fleet sits in cold equipment. SeaCube says about 70 per cent of its fleet is refrigerated containers. In 2019 the company told American Shipper that its owned and managed fleet came to 954,000 TEU of reefers, 756,000 TEU of dry containers and 90,000 gensets, which it said made it the third-largest lessor of reefers and the fifth-largest lessor of dry boxes.

A listing, a pension fund and a co-owner.

SeaCube spent a short period as a listed company. Ontario Teachers’ announcement of 18 January 2013 refers to SeaCube’s shares trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BOX and to an initial public offering in October 2010. In that announcement the pension plan agreed to acquire all of SeaCube’s shares, and it described SeaCube as one of the largest container leasing companies by total assets.

The deal closed that spring. On 24 April 2013 Ontario Teachers’ said it had completed the acquisition after SeaCube shareholders approved it at a special general meeting the day before. The pension plan said it would run SeaCube as a standalone business with the existing management team in place, and that the transaction was led by its Long-Term Equities group.

A second owner arrived ten years later. On 4 October 2023 Ontario Teachers’ announced that Wren House, a global infrastructure investment manager, had agreed to buy an equity stake in SeaCube, with the two investors sharing control under a co-control structure. SeaCube’s own news page reports that Wren House completed the purchase on 5 December 2023. In the 2023 announcement an Ontario Teachers’ managing director said that over the previous decade the management team had refocused the company’s strategy towards refrigerated equipment and the cold chain.

Leadership has been steady through both changes. SeaCube’s leadership page says Robert F. Sappio joined in 2014 as chief operating officer and became chief executive in June 2017, after earlier roles at APL, Rickmers-Linie and Alvarez & Marsal.

How container lessors present themselves.

Container lessors own the steel boxes that shipping lines fill and move. A carrier that does not want to buy every box it needs can lease them for a few months or many years, return them at a depot and lease again somewhere else. The lessors earn their names on the boxes themselves: a company wordmark, often in a strong blue, orange or green, painted on the doors and sides of containers that travel the world’s ports and railways for years.

Their websites are built around that fleet. Most sort it by box type: standard and high-cube dry containers for general cargo; refrigerated containers, or reefers, for chilled and frozen goods; tank containers for liquids; and specials such as flat racks, open tops and palletwide boxes for cargo that does not fit a standard van. Photographs of stacked dry, reefer and tank containers, as the companies publish them, do much of the visual work, together with technical sheets that give each box’s dimensions and standards.

The next layer is the network. Lessors publish depot maps and depot finders, lists of regional offices and customer portals where shipping lines can book, return and track their units. Many also sell boxes: pages for the sale of used containers offer units at the end of their marine life for storage, conversion or one more trip, and some lessors invite outside investors to own container portfolios that the lessor manages.

Behind the boxes sits finance. Container leasing is a business of long-lived assets and long contracts, so ownership matters, and many of the companies in this series have been merged, listed, taken private or folded into larger groups. Their investor pages and press releases are where those changes are recorded, and this guide sets out what each company’s own pages and dated reports show.

Reefers, gensets and data.

Much of SeaCube’s recent public material is about the technology inside its boxes. Its refrigerated-container page says the company has been adopting alternative refrigerants, including CO2, and lists reefers in 20-foot and 40-foot high-cube sizes, with 45-foot and 53-foot units available on request. The company says its vision is telematics as a standard across its reefer fleet. In January 2025 the trade title Cooling Post reported that SeaCube was working with CMA CGM to field-test Thermo King’s E-COOLPAC, a battery-powered genset for refrigerated containers, and described the company’s Green Reefer Leases as offering containers with newer controllers, telematics and real-time data analytics.

SeaCube buys rather than builds. American Shipper reported in 2019 that it buys containers and refrigeration equipment from the major suppliers, including the container makers CIMC and Singamas, and that its leases are generally triple-net, with the lessee paying insurance, taxes and maintenance. The same profile said initial leases usually run five to thirteen years, and that at the end of their working lives containers are sold on for one-way moves or secondary uses such as storage or building.

The company has also added services around the box. Its government services page says SeaCube has been contracted since 2019 by the U.S. Transportation Command as a source of intermodal equipment, mainly 20-foot dry containers, and that it also organises transport of that equipment for the command. A Cold Solutions arm rents and sells portable refrigerated containers for on-site cold storage in 20-foot and 40-foot sizes, the company says.

For a design guide, SeaCube shows how a lessor can build a public identity around a single equipment class, in its case the reefer. Compare Textainer and Triton International, two other container lessors. For this guide we use a deep navy, an ice blue and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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