When do Chinese Business Licenses Expire?
The Chinese Business License is one of the most important documents in the portfolio of documents, certificates, and forms that comprise your portfolio of required materials to establish a relationship with a Chinese company.
Understanding whether the business license is current (that is, not expired) is an important point of validation as part of your initial research and due diligence phases.
As we’ve covered in other articles, the Chinese Business License is one of the most important documents in the portfolio of documents, certificates, and forms that comprise your portfolio of required materials to establish a relationship with a Chinese company. Not surprisingly, a Chinese company should have a valid and current (i.e. unexpired) business license. The “period of operation” field (sometimes referred to as the “period of validity”) will provide you with the start and end date for the current license.
You also can confirm a Chinese company’s period of validity through its public registration record, commonly found on the local provincial websites from the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC). Note that you will need to know both the province in which the company is registered along with its name in Chinese. It’s important to note that the local SAIC website may not always have the most up-to-date information, so it’s a good idea to use this resource as a secondary point of validation.
As with all Chinese documents, you should take steps to ensure that the business license certificate is official and valid. We’ve outlined the steps you can take to verify the validity of a Chinese document in our companion article “Certifying Chinese documents’ authenticity.”
Additional Resources
We know verifying Chinese business certificates and licenses is difficult and time-consuming…especially when you don’t know where to start. Nuna Network helps you navigate the complexities of partnering with Chinese companies, providing information on everything you need to know before you do business together.