Fairmont Shipping HK Ltd
Thanks to SCT for proofreading the following:
HF: I came across Fairmont Shipping on a recent visit to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum while on a recent visit to HK.
“Fairmont Shipping HK Ltd was also active in Asia. The Ho family had owned small vessels and barges in the Shanghai days, plying the coastal trade. Robert C.F. Ho had moved to the United States in 1946 to take a degree in business administration at Columbia University in New York. He married Anita Magsaysay, whose father Don Ambrosio Magsaysay had set up Magsaysay Lines / Magsaysay Shipping in the Philippines, and joined the company. He also established the Liberian Intercontinental Steamship Co. Ltd (LISSCO) to purchase warships which the US government were auctioning off. Ho used the ships to deliver cargo to China as part of relief aid, selling the vessels very profitably for coastal trade work once they had completed their delivery. When Shanghai closed, vessels that were on the way there were diverted to Hong Kong and the Philippine Islands.
He set up Fairmont Shipping in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, in order to join in the Japanese shikumisen arrangements. With excellent contacts in Japan, many of Fairmont’s orders for newbuildings[?] were placed in joint ventures with Japanese companies and he used Hong Kong as a base through companies registered in Bermuda. After the shikumisem deals came to a halt, Fairmont and Magsaysay worked with major European and American charterers, buying ships through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Robert C.F. Ho’s son Robert A. Ho. is now at the helm of both companies.(1)
Sources:
- Changing Places: The remarkable story of Hong Kong shipowners, Stephanie Zarach, Hong Kong Shipowners Association 2007