Houngfuh – the Global Partner Powering “Smart Sorting Hubs” in the E-commerce Era

A global footprint built on automation expertise

Founded in Taipei in 1984, Houngfuh began as a provider of automation equipment for traditional industries. Four decades later, it has grown into a global manufacturer specialising in automation technology, serving more than 30 sectors: from lithium batteries, automotive parts, tyres and pharmaceuticals to home appliances, agricultural products, e-commerce, express delivery and modern retail.

Scale here is not just about factories or project counts; it is about technology accumulation. Houngfuh holds dozens of software copyrights, invention patents and more than a hundred utility and design patents across automation, sortation and warehouse systems. This intellectual-property portfolio forms the backbone for continuous improvement of its sorters, conveyor systems and intralogistics solutions, keeping pace with the rapidly rising demands of modern logistics hubs.

Thanks to its global network and “tailor-made” approach for each industry, Houngfuh exports not only hardware but also know-how. Every project in the US, Europe or Southeast Asia becomes a living case study, helping the company understand customer behaviour, order profiles and facility constraints in different markets – including high-growth emerging markets such as Viet Nam.

Smart sortation solutions – the “heartbeat” of modern logistics centres

If we imagine a warehouse as a living organism, the sorting system is its heart, pumping parcels to the right “organs” at the right time. This is where Houngfuh has invested for decades and built a strong reputation. As early as 1991, the company launched its first high-speed shoe sorter in Taiwan; from 2009 onward it rapidly expanded deployments across mainland China. With more than 30 years of experience in shoe sorter design and manufacturing, Houngfuh is now a core supplier for e-commerce, express, fashion, supermarket, pharmaceutical and tyre operations.

The company’s sortation portfolio is broad. Linear narrow-belt sorters handle bulky, heterogeneous items. High-speed slide-shoe sorters are optimised for parcel flows. Cross-belt sorters integrate mechanics, electronics, optics and control software to serve multi-industry logistics hubs. Swivel sorters flexibly process cartons, polybags, books and fragile items. At the pre-sort stage, Houngfuh developed an advanced singulation system using 3D cameras and deep-learning algorithms, capable of singulating and aligning up to 10,000 small, flat parcels per hour – traditionally a nightmare for manual operations.

By carefully combining mechanical design, electrical control, optical sensing and software, Houngfuh’s sortation systems can reach accuracy rates up to 99.99%, with throughputs of many tens of thousands of items per hour depending on configuration. Equally important, they handle a very wide range of parcel sizes and weights – from lightweight envelopes of a few dozen grams to bulky items weighing tens of kilograms. This versatility is vital as e-commerce hubs juggle B2C parcels, B2B shipments, reverse logistics and oversize items on the same infrastructure.

From JD and Cainiao to emerging e-commerce hubs – lessons for Viet Nam

The most convincing evidence for any solution provider lies in the projects it has delivered. In e-commerce and retail, Houngfuh’s customer list is impressive: JD Logistics, T-mall, players within the Alibaba–Cainiao ecosystem, and major retail chains in categories from mother-and-baby products to pharmaceuticals, fresh food and general merchandise. In each project, Houngfuh does far more than install a sorter; it designs an integrated intralogistics blueprint covering conveyors, lifts, accumulation zones, five-side barcode scanning, packing areas and outbound docks.

A flagship example is the logistics centre of Babemax, one of China’s leading mother-and-baby retailers. Based on the complex profile of omnichannel orders, Houngfuh designed five functional zones spread across multiple floors, combining stacker cranes, hundreds of conveyor lines, loop-type vertical conveyors and a high-performance sortation system operated by a WCS. The configuration “three spiral conveyors + merging + five-side scanning + slide-shoe sorting” delivers a sorting capacity of around 6,000 items per hour and improves operational efficiency by roughly 40% compared with the previous set-up.

In the fresh-food segment, Houngfuh’s solutions have been implemented in distribution centres that must handle chilled and frozen goods under strict time and temperature constraints. The core idea is to shorten human walking distance in cold zones and reduce energy consumption. By combining conveyors, sorters, barcode readers, storage systems and goods-to-person workstations, goods are routed to operators automatically instead of the other way around. As a result, accuracy rises, throughput increases and product waste from damage or expiry is reduced.

For Viet Nam – a market experiencing rapid growth in e-commerce and modern retail – these cases offer concrete lessons. First, investing in smart sorting hubs is not simply a matter of buying machines; it starts with redesigning the entire flow of goods, data and people. Second, automation levels can be phased in over time: from integrating conveyors and basic sorters into existing facilities, to building new, fully automated distribution centres. Third, working with partners who have global experience helps local companies avoid costly trial-and-error, because many “wrong turns” have already been identified and solved in thousands of previous projects.

As global supply chains are being reconfigured, Viet Nam has a rare chance to position itself as a new manufacturing and logistics hub in the region. To convert this opportunity into long-term advantage, however, the country must upgrade both its hard and soft logistics infrastructure – and smart sorting centres are a critical link in that chain. With 40 years of experience, eight factories, more than 6,300 projects worldwide and a product portfolio finely tuned for e-commerce, Houngfuh stands out as a strategic partner for Vietnamese enterprises embarking on the journey to rebuild their logistics hubs. Ultimately, this is not just a story about equipment; it is about raising operational standards and opening the door for Viet Nam to compete confidently on regional and global supply-chain maps.

By Tran Hoa