About SF Express
China-based SF Express specialises in domestic and international logistics solutions, spanning express services, freight services, cold chain and pharmaceutical logistics services, on-demand delivery services, as well as supply chain and cross-border ecommerce. It’s the largest integrated logistics service provider in Asia.
Introduction
With more Chinese enterprises expanding globally and SF Express identifying internationalisation as a core strategic priority, partnering with the right local ecosystem becomes critical.
The UK – and London in particular – is a key gateway market, but also highly mature and competitive. To succeed, SF Express needed not only to bring its existing strengths, but to embed itself in the local business and policy environment.
Grow London has been an essential partner on this journey, helping SF Express quickly understand the market, connect to the right stakeholders and build the foundations for long-term, mutually beneficial growth.
The challenge
When SF Express formally entered the UK market, its local footprint was still very limited: a small team, no warehousing capacity and few established relationships with regulators, service partners or local customers. The immediate challenge was to achieve a genuine “zero-to-one” breakthrough in a new, highly regulated and competitive logistics market.
At the same time, SF Express needed to clarify its positioning in the UK, rapidly build up end-to-end local capabilities, and turn these into sustainable revenue growth, while ensuring that its Chinese corporate clients could land smoothly in the UK and access reliable, high-quality logistics support.
How London & Partners helped
The collaboration between SF Express and Grow London began with strategic discussions at SF Express’s headquarters in China. Through these early conversations, Grow London gained a clear view of SF’s global expansion blueprint, while SF developed an initial understanding of the support and networks that Grow London could offer in the UK.
Building on this foundation, Grow London then supported the SF Express UK General Manager with a series of in-person meetings in London. Together, we identified concrete opportunity areas where Grow London could help accelerate SF’s “landing”: introductions to legal and regulatory experts, audit and financial advisers, property and warehouse advisors, and a broader network of Chinese and UK businesses already operating in the market.
As Grow London organised a series of targeted in-person events, SF Express was regularly invited to participate. Each event focused on a specific theme – from investment and policy to innovation and trade – and effectively brought together resources and decision-makers from both China and the UK.
During these events, and especially through Lesley Li’s proactive, thoughtful introductions, SF Express was able to meet long-established Chinese entrepreneurs, UK corporate leaders and ecosystem partners.
Many of these relationships have since developed into ongoing dialogues and practical cooperation, providing SF Express with crucial local insight, credibility and support at a critical stage of its UK journey.
The outcome
With Grow London’s support and the wider efforts of the SF Express team, the UK business has made a rapid transition from a small pilot to a fully fledged local operation.
The UK team has grown from three people to more than 50 employees, and warehousing capacity has expanded from zero to 3,200 sq m.
SF Express has invested in its own local fleet of eight vehicles and launched a dedicated 747 freighter service between Ezhou and East Midlands Airport, operating four times per week.
Daily parcel volumes from China to the UK have increased from around 3,000 to 83,000 parcels, while SF Express has also begun exporting UK products to China, enabling genuinely two-way trade.
On the regulatory and infrastructure side, SF Express has obtained three UK airport customs clearance licences and built an in-house customs team. At the same time, it has established deep cooperation with leading local carriers such as Royal Mail, Evri and Yodel, and, together with UK partners, has developed a franchise network of 5,203 local service points.
These capabilities are now being used to help Chinese enterprises land and integrate in the UK more smoothly, providing reliable logistics, customs and distribution services that shorten their “learning curve” and strengthen their confidence in the UK as a base for further European expansion.
Conclusion
As more Chinese enterprises choose the UK as a key destination for their international expansion, London has become a natural first stop for learning, exploration and partnership-building.
In this context, Grow London plays a uniquely important role as a bridge: it helps Chinese companies quickly understand the local environment, connect with both Chinese and UK businesses, and identify practical pathways to land, operate and grow.
For SF Express, the collaboration with Grow London has significantly accelerated our understanding of the UK market, strengthened our local ecosystem of advisers and partners, and given us greater confidence to invest in long-term capacity. This has directly enhanced our ability to serve Chinese and UK clients in both directions.
We are sincerely grateful to the Grow London team – especially Lesley Li – for their continuous support, professionalism and proactive engagement.
Looking ahead, we hope to deepen this partnership and, together, help more Chinese enterprises succeed in the UK and more UK companies reach customers in China.
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