Business License of a Chinese Company

After submitting documents to the registration authority (most often the Market Supervision Authority) and successfully registering the company, the first document received is the company's business license. This is the most basic document that any legal entity of any form registered in the territory of the PRC (with the exception of Hong Kong and Macau SARs, which use other documents) must have.

The screenshot below shows our business license. Let's look point by point at what data is displayed on it and what this means.

The number on the picture corresponds to the list number below.

Company Identifier: The company identifier is a Unified Social Credit Number (统一社会信用代码) or Business License Number, which, after optimization completed in 2015, is a single cross-platform identifier of a legal entity in the PRC. It consists of 18 characters, where the first digit indicates the government body that registered the company (9 - Market Supervision Authority), the second digit is the type of company (1 is a limited liability company), numbers 3 to 8 are a six-digit geographic code identifying the place of registration of the company (in our case, 440300 - Shenzhen), numbers 9 to 17 are the company's unique number, and 18 is a verification number. The USCN uses numbers and letters of the Latin alphabet, with the exception of the letters I, O, Z, S, and V.
Original (正本) or Copy (副本): Despite the names, both are original documents, differing only in size. The original is an A3 sheet, while the copy is an A4 sheet. When performing some of the most important and significant actions, such as opening a bank account, it is necessary to provide the original. For everything else, a copy is sufficient.
QR Code: This leads either to the Chinese central platform gsxt.gov.cn or to the local city/provincial platform (in our case, local szcredit.org.cn), where you can check the authenticity of the business license and see basic information about the company.
Company Name: It will almost always consist of 4 parts: “city name” + “personal name” + “field of activity” + “type of company”. In our case, it is 深圳市 (Shenzhen) + 篁龙 (Bamboo Dragon) + 科技咨询 (Technical Consultation) + 有限公司 (Limited Liability Company). If the company has outgrown the size of the city and has a significant presence in the province, it can change the name from “city” to “province”. If a company has reached the state level and has a significant presence in half of the regions of China, it can completely remove this part from the name. The name 集团 (Holding) can be added only for particularly large companies that have at least 3 business scopes significantly present in half of the regions of the PRC. The prefix 中国 (China) can be added to the beginning of the name if more than 25% of the shares are owned by the central government of the People's Republic of China.
Company Type: The first part, in our case 有限责任公司 (Limited Liability Company), denotes the type of company. Often this is an LLC; there are also non-profit organizations (非经营性单位), government organizations (机关单位), partnerships (合伙企业), individual entrepreneurs (个体工商户), etc. The second part indicates the type of investment, which can be 外商投资 (foreign investment, like ours), 内资 (Chinese investment), and 合资 (mixed investment). It also indicates the number of investors: sole investor (独资) and two or more (非独资).
Legal Representative: The legal representative of the company (法定代表人) is a person who, according to the company's charter, is its legal representative.
Date of Company Foundation
Company Registration Address: This may not coincide with the address of actual activity or office location.
Registration Authority: The registration authority that issued the business license, in our case, is the Shenzhen Market Supervision Authority.