SITC Brand Guidelines: Shandong Haifeng, a 2010 Hong Kong Listing and an Intra-Asia Fleet

A 1991 start and a 2010 listing.

SITC’s Chinese name is 海丰, Haifeng. Chinese Wikipedia says the group was founded on 14 May 1991 by its chairman Yang Shaopeng as Shandong Haifeng Group, named for the coastal province of Shandong in northern China. Today the listed parent is SITC International Holdings, which the company describes as headquartered in Hong Kong; Chinese Wikipedia gives it head offices in both Shanghai’s Pudong district and Hong Kong’s Wan Chai.

The company’s own milestone page opens its public story in 2010, when SITC International was listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong; Chinese Wikipedia dates the listing to 6 October 2010. In 2011 it set up two joint ventures: a container terminal company at Qianwan in Qingdao with APL, and a logistics company at Dinh Vu, near Haiphong in Vietnam. A Singapore branch followed in 2012, and in 2013 a second phase of the Dinh Vu depot opened and a logistics company was set up in Ho Chi Minh City.

Those entries set the pattern for the decade that followed: more ports, more depots and more ships. The company says its container shipping capacity stood at 78,748 TEU in mid-2014, 86,948 TEU at the end of 2015 and 99,986 TEU at the end of 2016. In 2015 its board received a Directors of the Year award from the Hong Kong Institute of Directors, the milestone page says. In 2019 it signed a rail-sea intermodal agreement with China Railway Container Transport and a South African logistics joint venture with Hisense Group and the Israeli company EXIT; in 2020 it launched a Southeast Asia–Qingdao Express service and opened a depot in Jakarta.

The chairmanship has changed hands. In August 2021 The Loadstar quoted the chairman, Yang Shaopeng, saying SITC would keep buying container ships and containers and investing in logistics projects as and when appropriate; in October 2024 the same publication named Yang Xianxiang as chairman.

An intra-Asia network of feeder-sized ships.

SITC presents itself as an intra-Asia specialist. Its company profile calls it a shipping and logistics company focused on the intra-Asia area, and The Loadstar describes it as an “intra-Asia carrier.” Its business runs from container liner shipping and ship management to ship broking, freight forwarding, shipping agency, customs clearance, consolidation, warehousing, container depots and port work, the company says.

By the company’s count, as of 30 June 2026 it operated 120 vessels, 98 of them owned, on 74 service routes calling at 79 main ports, from Japan and Korea through Southeast Asia to Bangladesh, Myanmar and India. Its Chinese-language home page carries a 2026 network map of 82 routes and 82 ports in 16 countries and regions, so the figures differ from page to page. Citing the analyst Alphaliner, the company says it ranked 14th among container lines by capacity at the end of 2025, and that it carried more than 3.85 million TEU that year.

The fleet is built around feeder-sized ships. In August 2021 The Loadstar reported that SITC had bought the 1,032 TEU SITC Rizhao second-hand that April, and had ordered twelve 1,023 TEU ships from Dae Sun Shipbuilding in Korea and eight from Yangzijiang Shipbuilding in China, four of 2,600 TEU and four of 1,800 TEU. In October 2024 the publication reported an order for six 1,800 TEU feeder ships from Huanghai Shipbuilding, disclosed in a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing, and wrote that SITC, which already owned more than 100 ships, wanted to cement its status as one of the largest intra-Asia carriers. The company says its owned container fleet reached 100 ships in 2024, and that after exercising options its active orderbook stood at 30 vessels in 2026.

The network keeps reaching south and west. The milestone page lists new calls at Taipei, Penang and Pasir Gudang in 2019; at Rizhao, Singapore and Chittagong in 2020; at Chennai and Visakhapatnam in India; and at Hitachinaka, Batam and Haldia in 2024. In 2025, it says, it began a direct service of its own from north China to east India, and in 2026 a container depot in Da Nang, Vietnam, began operating.

How box lines and ports present themselves.

Container lines, box lessors and port operators sell capacity rather than consumer products, and they present themselves mostly to shippers, carriers, investors and job seekers. Their identities travel on large objects. A line’s colours and name are repeated on hulls, on the containers it owns and on terminal equipment. Corporate photography tends to show ships at sea, stacked containers and cranes over quays, often lit at night.

Websites carry much of the practical work. Carriers publish schedules, route maps and booking or tracking tools; lessors such as Triton run sales portals, product sheets and pages on container conditions; terminal operators list their ports, berths and services. Fleet pages and dated timelines matter a great deal: Seaspan’s site, for example, sets out its history as a year-by-year list of ship deliveries, designs and orders.

Fuel and emissions now have pages of their own. Shipowners and lines describe dual-fuel ships, retrofits and new fuels such as LNG and methanol, usually in their own words and with their own figures, alongside sustainability reports and the certificates and policies they choose to publish. Those pages are statements by the companies, and this guide reports them as such.

Ownership changes often. Many companies in this group were formed by merger, are owned by infrastructure or private-equity investors, or are partly held by the carriers they serve, and their annual reports, preference shares and investor pages remain public even after a take-private. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it was founded, who owns it and how it describes its business — and marks clearly what rests only on its own word.

Four letters, a Chinese name and a set of maps.

The name works on several levels. The listed parent is SITC International Holdings; the shipping arm is SITC Container Lines, the name The Loadstar uses; offices in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indonesia trade as SITC Line, according to the links on the group website; and the land side trades as SITC Logistics. Ship names such as SITC Rizhao carry the same four letters, and the Chinese name 海丰 sits beside them on the Chinese-language site.

Much of the public face is practical. The group website leads with “hotspot” maps of its container and logistics networks for 2026, port-by-port pages on route density and direct and transhipment services, and links to an e-business site for cargo tracking, vessel movements and voyage plans. Its sustainability section is split into environmental protection, social responsibility and corporate governance. Its milestones record an agreement with a Chinese Academy of Sciences venture capital company to study the use of green methanol in shipping logistics, and an automated container depot in Qingdao that began operating in 2025. Investor pages carry the regular reports, announcements and circulars of a Hong Kong-listed company.

The record also includes a regulatory case. In January 2022 the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined 23 liner operators, SITC among them, over what it found was the fixing of freight rates on routes between South Korea and Southeast Asia from 2003 to 2018, The Loadstar reported.

For a design guide, SITC shows how a regional carrier presents itself through network maps, port pages and a long run of fleet and depot milestones. Compare COSCO Shipping, another Chinese container line, and KMTC, a South Korean container line named in the same 2022 case. For this guide we use a deep navy, a sea teal and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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