Chinese Business Licence

A business licence is easy to fake as an image and hard to fake as an object. That distinction matters more than anything else on this page.

The licence must be displayed at the registered place of business. So a person standing in the building can photograph the actual framed document in about ten seconds — a document the buyer has usually spent a week asking for and received as a compressed JPEG. The photograph on the wall, next to the sign on the gate, with the street outside in the frame, is a materially different piece of evidence.

Read the name first. Chinese trade names and English marketing names drift apart constantly: a supplier may introduce itself as “Hengtai Metal” while the licence says 佛山市南海恒泰金属制品有限公司 and the bank account belongs to a third entity entirely. Those three names should be compared, not admired separately.

Read the registered address second. “Registered address” in China is a filing address. It can be a virtual office, an incubator, or an accountant’s desk. This is why a licence alone is weak evidence of manufacturing capacity — and why the combination of licence address, permit address and a person at the gate is strong.

Read the establishment date third. A company founded eighteen months ago that describes twenty years of factory experience is not necessarily lying — the founders may have worked in the industry for decades — but the entity itself is young, and any claim attached to “our company history” deserves a question.

Finally, the licence is a photograph, not a verification. If you cannot confirm that the licence belongs to the entity you are paying, the document proves nothing at all.

Last checked 2026-10