Verifying a Chinese Business License With a Factory Audit

Most small businesses look to the “East” for suppliers and China is a highly sought after destination.

However, the key concern for these buyers is identifying reliable suppliers and safeguarding themselves from any potential risks. We will take a look at some simple ways to do this .

If you are a buyer looking for new suppliers in China, you might end up with a list of a couple of potential good ones. Of course you then want to find out whether these suppliers are indeed reliable and experienced, or whether it’s a scam, so make china company verification with a Factory Audit is very useful at this stage in.

When a factory audit is conducted by a third party quality control company, they always collect as much information as possible about the supplier of your choice. A large part of an audit consists of document collection. However, at the site it is not possible to verify these documents, especially business licenses, as they could be problematic. Chinese government authorities cannot legally protect your business if you are doing ‘business’ with illegal companies. However, there is only so much you can do to find out whether or not the license is legitimate.

First, what is a business license? Each legal company has to register itself with a local Chinese Bureau of Industry and Commerce or a similar government agency. Rural companies tend to register at a provincial level, but urban companies usually register at the city level. The company then gets a unique company number, which will be printed onto a nice document: the business license.

Then, how can we help you verify this unique company number and the business license? A QC company can check the business license itself for signs of forgery. There are several common ‘mistakes’ that we know how to find, such as false names or addresses, but this requires a close look and an experienced eye. At the factory, the auditor usually has to work his way through many documents, so he simply does not have the luxury to sit back with one document and take his time to inspect it. Therefore, this is much better done at the office. If any discrepancies are found in the document you can be certain the business license is a fake.

When there is no sign of forgery on the business license, it is not necessarily a legitimate document. The unique company number could still be false. Even though we possess the skills to find out the truth, an investigation might have inconclusive results. Sometimes it is sufficient to search for the supplier directly online through the website of the relevant Bureau of Industry & Commerce. However, note that all information from the Bureaus is in Chinese. At a provincial level in industrial provinces, like Guangdong province, information about business licenses is accessible online, but in less developed regions and on other governmental levels information is usually not readily available. In this case QC staff will contact the Bureau directly. It then depends on the Bureau how long it will take to get information and they will usually ask you to come by the Bureau in person an discuss the options.

As you can see, verifying a Chinese business license is a unique company registration number requires quite some effort, because there is not one database where all the numbers can be found. The registration system in China is very decentralized, which makes it hard to just go ahead and verify the business license by yourself. As a third party inspection company, AQF can definitely help out.

china company verification

Something About China property bonds

To many global investors, bonds from China’s property sector are toxic nuclear waste, not to be touched at any cost. To others, they come with a more pragmatic “handle with care” warning. I belong to the latter camp.

From just a handful of bonds 10 years ago, the sector has grown to contribute 9.5% of the Asian US dollar bond market with US$51bn of bonds trading. That is nearly a third of all high-yield corporate bonds in the region.

Over this period, the sector has gone through three cycles of downturns and upturns. Several Chinese property companies have issued, redeemed and refinanced their offshore bonds. Companies with credit ratings ranging from Single A to Triple C have managed to issue bonds, which chinese trade credit actively in the secondary market. Yet, a feeling of unease persists.

Perhaps the first source of discomfort is the fact that offshore Chinese property bonds are deeply subordinated, since they are issued by offshore-incorporated entities, which inject the bond proceeds as equity into their onshore companies and service their debt only out of equity dividends received back from the mainland. The difficulties in repatriating equity funds out of China mean that the offshore principal effectively has to be refinanced. In case of bankruptcy, the onshore lenders have the first claim over the onshore assets.

While this structural weakness is undoubtedly true, it applies to every other bond issued by Chinese businesses, including investment-grade bonds far beyond the property sector, since the structure was born out of regulations prohibiting the issuance of debt or guarantees by mainland companies. (Only recently have the authorities begun to relax this prohibition, and the first few offshore bonds are now coming out with direct guarantees from mainland operating companies.)

ANOTHER SOURCE OF discomfort is the government’s meddling in the property sector through various measures, including the flow of credit to the builders, rules for financing land purchases, obtaining mortgages, and mortgage down-payment requirements. The harshest controls came in 2010 when the government restricted the number of apartments that an individual could purchase.

Property prices are a sensitive subject everywhere, and China is no exception. The government presses the brakes if the prices are speeding too fast and pushes the accelerator if property construction flags too much so as to threaten the overall economic growth.

This government intervention makes asset values volatile in both equity and debt markets, and raises the cost of capital to the sector.

Some investors have also been scared away by stories of oversupply and ghost cities. The property development business model, by definition, consists of a long operating cycle, and there may be genuine demand/supply imbalances, as in any other industry, but the overwhelming majority of Chinese properties are built in response to actual demand from a rapidly urbanising population. The same goes for talk of speculative buying, when the reality is that most of the properties are bought for self-occupation. Buyers have to put up a minimum 30% down-payment, they are not over-leveraged and there is no subprime lending.

WHEN IT COMES to investing in Chinese property bonds, one should realise that there has already been one level of filtering – only those companies large enough to go through a rating process and the expense of issuing offshore actually end up selling dollar bonds. They are all listed offshore, most of them in Hong Kong, and are subject to audits and disclosures that go with the listing status. The additional scrutiny from equity analysts and investors that comes with listing also offers additional information for bond investors.

There has not been a single default in the sector so far, and only two distressed exchanges in 2009, both at 80 cents to the dollar. Some companies did go through financial distress during previous sector downturns, but they managed to sell land or unfinished projects to stronger players and stave off default.

This is not to argue that we would never see a default in the sector. We will, sooner or later. But the sector has genuine fundamentals, strong and weak players, and saleable assets that can be realised in times of distress.

So, how should one approach investments in Chinese property bonds? First of all, investors need to be prepared for the volatility that comes with the regulatory changes. Any crash in value following a regulatory tightening offers an opportunity to pick up the higher-quality bonds at more attractive prices. In fact, such moves also enable the stronger players to buy out the weaker ones or to acquire assets from the struggling players, and increase their market share.

The current downturn in the market is no different. It is true that the stock of unsold property is running above average; that the leverage has increased in the last 12-18 months in response to slowing sales; that margins are under pressure due to the pressure to liquidate stock; and that some of the weaker companies are likely to experience a liquidity crunch in the next 12-18 months, unless they slow down their expansion. But the current downturn is also an opportunity to pick up bonds issued by stronger companies, which will benefit from the tight conditions in the sector. The challenge is reading the credit fundamentals carefully enough to identify the winners.

What is Taobao’s Tmall?

Tmall, also known as the the Taobao Mall, is China’s largest platform for B2C shopping and belongs to Taobao.com (which was founded as a C2C platform similar to Ebay).

On January 11th, 2012, Taobao Mall changed its name to Tmall.

On Tmall you can find especially well-known brand flagship stores and authorized stores for selling famous brand’s products.

Currently, Taobao Mall presents more than 30,000 local and global brands products of multiple different industries. This “vertical mall” includes for example the “Electric City”, “Shoes Collection” and “Home Improvement Exhibition”. In future the Tamll will be enhanced with by adding further vertical industry markets.


The main differences between Taobao and Tmall (Taobao Mall)


    Tmall is a split-off of Taobao.com
    While on Taobao private people can sell (like on Ebay), the sellers on Tmall must be China-registered companies
    In Novem-ber 2010, Tmall, launched an autonomous web domain called as “tmall.com” in order to dis-tin-guish the list-ings made by Taobao Mall mer-chants, who were autho-rized dis-trib-u-tors or brand own-ers, from Taobao’s Consumer-To-Consumer (C2C) platform.
    The prod-uct list-ings on Tmall are much stricter when com-pared to Taobao.
    Unlike Taobao, Tmall requires a refund-able secu-rity deposit from com-pa-nies to list/market their products.
    Normally, the Tmall stores display on top of the search result page when people search on Taobao.

Taobao FOCUS is not only a Taobao agent for your online shopping in China, but a friend indeed. Our mission is to help and let more international buyers enjoy shopping on Taobao – amazing China’s largest online marketplace. We help you in these ways:

Language: if you do not know Chinese or have difficulties with Taobao English translation, such as agreetao.com. we search your desired items, talk with the Taobao seller and provide you as much detailed information as possible.

Shopping: We advise you regarding the product from our own experience. Is the seller reliable? Is the item of good quality? Is it good or not to buy the item at all? We tell you everything.

Minimizing the risk: We make sure that Taobao seller really sends out the items, we check the items for visual defects in our warehouse, provide you the photo of purchased items and repack them to ensure safe shipment to your address.