Hay Nien Company Limited is a well-established import and export trading company in Hong Kong with regional offices in Shanghai, Fuzhou and Shenzhen. The company has its own head office located in their 12 storey building with picture perfect view towards the Victoria harbor and the newly erected Harbour Cruise terminal at Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong. Who would have believed that this was all started humbly by 2 brothers and their brother-in-law over 65 years ago. With each of their own specialty backgrounds and profession, the company was first involved with engineering, assembling and installation, manufacturing as well as trading.

In the early days, as one of the brothers is an engineer who specializes in machineries; he started assembly of hydraulic machines for quarrying, knitting machines for potato sacks, and assembling machines for compress bailing for cotton waste and yarn waste. The company then started importing inboard engine motors and installing them for fishing junks and work boats near the Kowloon Bay area (in fact, the present Hay Nien Building location is within close proximity of this earlier site). This later became the importing division of the company which acts as agents for oversea brands who would like to establish business in Hong Kong and China. The company began importing marine pumps from Sweden (previously Johnson Pump *now SPX), marine cables and controls from Sweden (previously Teleflex * now SeaStar Solutions). Hay Nien also has a long history of importing gardening tools and lawn care equipment such as lawn mowers from UK (Hayter), Italy (Castel Garden), USA (Rolcut and American Lawn Mower), chain saws, tree branch trimmers, handpumps and backpack trimmers and sprayers from Germany (Solo). We have over generations of business relationship with some of these brands and have been stocking distributorship for these overseas customers for Hong Kong and China in various different industries.

Amid the post second world war period, the company has also traded in scrap metals, food staples such as eggs and frozen prawns as well as leather stocks to local tanneries in New Territories. The initial office located at On Lee Hong was later moved to Central’s Prince Building. It was a small tiny office (approx. 1500 sq. feet) but at one time it has to accommodate up to twenty some staffs. Hong Kong has continued to enjoy the benefits of an entrepot trade centre until the outbreak of China’s civil war where trade begins to falter. By then, everything was on a tight budget, and there were times when business was so hard to come by, that staff’s salaries and suppliers’ invoices were prayed for each night. As it turns out, all the prayers were answered in a timely manner and up to this day, the company has not had a single delay in salary and invoice payments. With Japan in ruins after World War 2 and UN embargo on trade with China, Hong Kong has quickly become Asia’s unrivaled industrial centre with the huge flight of labour, capital and expertise from China. It became a manufacturing base for various new industries and has experienced an enormous economic growth due to the flourishing industrialization in particular with exporting of textiles and plastics industries. Hay Nien was then exporting toys, dolls and dress ups, stationeries and party supplies. Later on, as the factories in Hong Kong became more sophisticated the manufacturing trend shifted to electronics, and optical goods, the company diversified its products range for exports into hardwares, locks, tools, kitchen items and household decorations. Our customers extended from UK, United States to Australia and Japan. Rent began to sky-rocket year after year to a stage where it is not feasible for a small scale trading business to maintain its office in Central. In the late 70’s the company had the opportunity to bid for a small plot of reclaimed land (which is in the Kowloon Bay area where it is near the original site). After years of hard work and saving, the project of building our current office location was finally completed. Today, Hay Nien continues our business by utilizing a few floors of the Hay Nien Building and put the remaining floors for rental thus stabilizing our financial strength and security.

On top of trading business, slowly and steadily Hay Nien began to establish a sounding reputation for private sourcing and the capability of offering a wide selection of reliable and cost effective suppliers for OEM projects. We can offer from making of prototypes, to supervising and checking of custom tooling, as well as carrying out pre-audits and guidance to factories that required by customers to acquire certain certifications. From time to time, our clients will ask us to carry out on their behalf factory audits checks as well as inline production quality checks and pre-shipment quality controls. With the long history of Hay Nien’s business, we began building a long list of clients that are involved with licensed characters. We have clients that are license holders and we began developing a wide variety of licensed products for our customers to ship to France, Europe, North America as well as other Asian countries. We have customer that sells Disney characters figurine bottles filled with bubble baths, Hello Kitty characterized cosmetics and lip gloss gift sets for children, Marvel’s Spiderman licensed bath games as well as other license characters in stationeries and educational toys. Besides high-end licensed products, we also have customers that supplies Looney Tunes licensed products to fast food restaurant chains like KFC and theme parks in Scandinavia where the cost is comparatively low but the quantity is very large. Besides fast food chain restaurants, we have also customers that sell their Barbie licensed products and Thomas the Tank, Tele-Tubbies products to most well-known retailers such as Mark and Spencer, Tesco in UK to Walmart in US. After working together with these partners for so many years, we have gained the expertise to manage a wide range of OEM products from selection of approved factories to carrying out factory audits, getting samples approved to working with factories for pre-shipment samples to co-ordinating multi-port shipments.

Hay Nien values and stresses highly the importance of quality of service to our customers; and has always aims at maintaining and looking out for the interest of our customers our top priority. The company strives to create a long term business relations with our customers no matter large or small. At present, Hay Nien is being run by the third generation and the management is striving to ensure that our customers, suppliers and staff are consistently treated with fairness and integrity.


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