He grew his family business, the Swire Group, and expanded the cotton and sugar trade with China.
He established the Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Hong Kong and The China Navigation Company on the Yangtze river.
John Samuel Swire was born on 24 December 1825 in Liverpool, England.
[1][2] They inherited the family business when their father died in 1847, when Swire was twenty-two years old.
[2] A year later, in 1868, they parted ways, as Swire kept the Shanghai office and Butterfield kept the English and American operations.
This was a grouping of some of the steamship owners involved in routes from China and Japan to Britain.
These discounts were deferred for, typically, six months and were not payable if the shipper used a ship outside the conference in that time.