Wan Hai

Wan Hai Lines was established in Taiwan in 1965, and the reason for its founding is unusual enough to be worth stating: Chen Yung-tai set the shipping business up because his paper mills needed a dependable supply of logs from Southeast Asia, and chartering someone else's ships was proving unreliable. The line converted to container operations in the 1970s and grew from that captive-cargo origin into one of the largest regional carriers in the world. It remains controlled by the Chen family and their long-standing business partners the Lins, which puts it in the small group of major container lines still under founding-family control despite being publicly listed in Taipei. Wan Hai bought a fifty-percent stake in Interasia Lines in 1992 and reportedly acquired MOL's remaining shares in 2005; Interasia continues to trade under its own name with its own container prefixes and booking systems, and its shareholding runs through Liberian holding companies, but it is generally understood to sit under Chen family control.

The fleet reflects the regional business rather than a deep-sea one. Alphaliner ranks Wan Hai eleventh among global liner operators with around 124 vessels totalling roughly 624,000 TEU. The more striking number is the orderbook: approximately 41 vessels totalling about 418,000 TEU, equivalent to something in the region of seventy percent of the existing fleet, which is the most aggressive expansion ratio among the top-twenty carriers. Those orders span a wide range of sizes. Wan Hai has contracted eight 16,000 TEU ships in South Korea at Samsung Heavy Industries and HD Hyundai Samho, the largest vessels it has ever ordered, alongside 11,000 TEU and 9,200 TEU units at Shanghai Waigaoqiao, 8,700 TEU dual-fuel newbuildings, 8,000 TEU ships at Taiwan's CSBC, and smaller 6,000 TEU LNG dual-fuel tonnage. Most of the recent designs are specified as dual-fuel-ready for LNG or methanol rather than committing to one fuel outright.

Wan Hai is not a member of any of the three major alliances, and this is the point most often got wrong about it. Its general manager has confirmed publicly that it has been invited to join one, and it cooperates extensively with alliance members without belonging to any: from May 2026 it operates a joint Transpacific service with Ocean Network Express, branded AP2 by Wan Hai and PS8 by ONE, running Qingdao, Ningbo, Los Angeles, Oakland with ONE contributing three ships and Wan Hai two, and ONE's Premier Alliance partners HMM and Yang Ming taking slots on it. ONE separately provides Wan Hai with weekly slot capacity on a Premier Alliance service. That pattern — selective slot swaps and joint strings rather than a formal vessel-sharing agreement — lets Wan Hai add long-haul reach without surrendering control over the intra-Asia network that remains its core. The company has also begun buying into terminal capacity: in January 2026 it committed roughly $87 million to a right-of-use agreement on Terminal C9 at Osaka Port with Mitsui Warehouse Port & Transport, covering about 130,000 square metres from September, building on an earlier lease of the Honmoku D4 terminal at Yokohama. The stated logic is operational autonomy and schedule reliability on Japan-Taiwan routes rather than terminal ownership as an investment in itself. Maalbardaar tracks and clears Wan Hai shipments for Pakistani importers and exporters.