Merlin Bingham Swire, a sixth-generation descendant of the Swire group’s founder, will step down as chairman of Swire Pacific and Swire Properties, after the giant Hong Kong conglomerate reported its first ever loss in history.Guy Bradley, currently chief executive of Swire Properties, has been appointed as the new chairman of Swire Pacific and Swire Properties, the company said late on Friday.
“After three years in Hong Kong, Merlin Swire will resume his role as chief executive of John Swire & Sons, the parent company of the Swire group, and return to London,” the British-controlled group announced in a company statement.
The sprawling Swire empire owns stakes in almost every aspect of Hong Kong life, from the bottling of drinks and sugar refining to developing commercial and residential property, and operating the city’s dominant airlines.Merlin Swire joined the group in Hong Kong in 1997 and worked his way through various units within it in Hong Kong, Sydney, Shanghai, Xiamen and London. He has been executive director of Swire Pacific for the past 10 years and took over as chairman of Swire Pacific and Swire Properties in 2018.
He will remain a director of Swire Pacific, Swire Properties and Cathay Pacific, when he steps down on 24 August.
“I am proud of the resilience that the entire Swire Pacific group has shown over the past three years, in particular the resilience which the team at Cathay Pacific has shown in the face of Covid-19,” the 47-year-old said in the statement.
“I will continue to spend a substantial part of each year in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. In the mainland, we intend to grow our core property and beverage businesses, and to build scale in new sectors such as healthcare.”
The personnel change comes as the profitability of Swire Pacific, the holding company, has been struggling to recover from the worst period in its history after being hit first by the social unrest that rattled Hong Kong in 2019 and then the Covid-19 outbreak.
Swire Pacific reported its first ever annual loss – of HK$10.99 billion (US$1.42 billion) – in March and warned of further trouble ahead.
Its 45 per cent-owned Cathay Pacific Airways saw record losses of HK$21.6 billion in 2020, a year blighted by the pandemic.
To gain a foothold in China’s lucrative aviation market, Swire Pacific and its partners in Cathay Pacific had to reorganise the carrier’s top management amid the social unrest twp years ago. That led to the departure of the airline’s chief executive Rupert Hogg and chairman John Slosar.
“This has been a year of historical challenges for us, and the progress of many of our businesses was sharply arrested by Covid-19. Cathay Pacific was particularly hard hit,” said Merlin Swire in the company’s annual results briefing in March.
Swire’s Chinese name is Taikoo, which loosely translates as “great and ancient”. The name was selected by Thomas Taylor Meadows, the British consul in Shanghai at the time when the group founded by John Swire in 1816 came to Shanghai in 1866 under the name of Butterfield & Swire.
Merlin Swire is the sixth-generation descendant of John Swire.
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