Jardines (company)

Jardine Matheson Holdings Limited (also known as Jardines) is a Hong Kong–based, Bermuda–domiciled and British–founded multinational conglomerate. It has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and secondary listings on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSE).

The majority of its business interests are in Asia, and its subsidiaries include Jardine Pacific, Jardine Motors, Hongkong Land, Jardine Strategic Holdings, DFI Retail Group, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Jardine Cycle & Carriage and Astra International. It set up the Jardine Scholarship in 1982 and Mindset, a mental health-focused charity, in 2002.

Jardines was one of the original Hong Kong trading houses or hongs that date back to Imperial China. 58 percent of the company's profits were earned in China in 2019. The company is controlled by the Keswick family, who are descendants of co-founder William Jardine's older sister, Jean Johnstone.

Jardine Matheson is a Fortune Global 500 company. In 2013, both Jardine Matheson and Jardine Strategic were among the top 200 publicly traded companies in the world, as valued by market capitalisation.

The firm of Jardine, Matheson & Company emerged in 1832 from an evolving process of partnership changes in the trading business Cox & Reid, a partnership established in 1782 between John Cox and John Reid, the latter having been agent of the Austrian trading company, Trieste Company.

University of Edinburgh Medical School graduate William Jardine (1784–1843) joined the firm, by then having morphed through Cox & Beale, Beale & Company and Beale & Magniac into Magniac & Company, and the original partners long gone, in 1825 at the invitation of principal Hollingworth Magniac. University of Edinburgh graduate James Matheson joined three years later as Magniac prepared to retire. With the cession of Hong Kong under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, the firm, by then named Jardine, Matheson & Company, set up its headquarters on the island and grew rapidly, smuggling illegal opium from British-controlled India into China. Jardine Matheson has been called the "most successful opium smuggling company in the world".

Both Jardine and Matheson became members of Parliament in Britain, and Matheson also bought the entire Scottish island of Lewis, clearing over 500 families off the land and shipping them to Canada in order to build Lews Castle. Continuing its longstanding trade in smuggled opium, tea, and cotton, the firm diversified into other areas including insurance, shipping, and railways.

By the mid-19th century, the company had become the largest of the hongs or foreign trading conglomerates with offices in all the important Chinese cities as well as Yokohama, Japan. One of its branch agencies, Glover and Co., established in Nagasaki, was known in Japan as an arms dealer who contracted with then-rebel forces from Chōshū Domain who led the Meiji Restoration in 1868.