How to read a Chinese business licence, field by field

A mainland Chinese business licence (营业执照) is the document a buyer is likely to receive first and understand least. It is dense, entirely in Chinese, and carries a red seal that looks authoritative. This guide explains each field in the order it usually appears, then sets out what the document can and cannot tell you.

Mainland business licences are issued in original and duplicate forms. Market Entity Registration Regulations. The 2019 format standardised the QR-code link to the public registry. SAMR, 2018. A September 2022 update removed the business-term field from the affected licence formats; existing licences did not have to be replaced solely for that change. SAMR, 2022. Fields also vary by entity type, so a licence for an individual business or a branch will not carry every field described below.

Name (名称)

The Chinese registered name. For a mainland market entity this is the name held in the registry and the primary string to match across documents. It typically follows a pattern of region, trade name, industry and organisational form (Enterprise Name Registration Regulations), for example 深圳市示例科技有限公司, which a supplier might render as “Shenzhen Sample Technology Co., Ltd.” The English is a translation; the mainland registry does not record it as the registered name, although an English name may appear in other business records, such as a customs registration where the company supplies it itself (customs registration form), and a supplier may translate the name differently on different documents.

When you compare documents, compare the Chinese string character for character. A single different character is a discrepancy to check, not an automatic conclusion: it may be a change of name, an older document or a typing error, or it may be a different entity. Resolve it by comparing the USCC and, where you can, the registry’s record of name changes.

Unified Social Credit Code (统一社会信用代码)

The 18-character identifier assigned to legal persons and other registered organisations in mainland China. Holding a code does not by itself mean the holder is an independent legal person; branches and individual businesses hold codes too. The code is unique and does not change when the name changes or when the entity relocates to another region. State Council, 2015, GB 32100-2015.

The code has an internal structure: the first character indicates the registering authority, the second an institutional category, characters three to eight the administrative division code of the registering authority, the following nine an organisation code, and the last a check character. The category character does not always translate into a specific legal form; use the Type field for that.

You can check the structure and decode the region and category with our free credit code checker. A valid structure means the code could have been issued; it does not mean the entity is currently registered, or that the code belongs to the name on the licence. Both require a lookup of the registry record.

Type (类型)

The legal form of the entity. Forms you are likely to meet include:

• 有限责任公司 — limited liability company. May be qualified with phrases such as 自然人投资或控股 (invested or controlled by natural persons), 外商投资 (foreign-invested) or 国有独资 (wholly state-owned).
• 股份有限公司 — company limited by shares.
• 个体工商户 — individual industrial and commercial household. This is an individual or family running a registered business, not a company. It is a different form from the sole proprietorship enterprise below, and under the Civil Code its debts are borne by the individual, or by the family where the business is run as a family operation. Civil Code, art. 56.
• 个人独资企业 — sole proprietorship enterprise, an enterprise form with a single individual investor. Sole Proprietorship Enterprise Law.
• 分公司 — a branch of a company.

The type matters for who is liable and who you are contracting with. A limited liability company is a separate legal person. A branch is not a separate legal person, but it may conduct civil activities in its own name. The legal person that established it bears the resulting civil liability under the applicable rules, so when a branch is the seller, identify its parent company as well. Civil Code, art. 74.

Legal representative (法定代表人)

The natural person registered as having authority to act for the company. This is a specific statutory role in China, not a general term for “manager”, and the person in it may not be the person you correspond with.

The legal representative has a specific statutory role. Other people may also bind the company through their authority or applicable agency rules. A signature or seal alone does not settle that question. Ask for evidence of authority appropriate to the transaction and confirm it independently with the company. Asking for a written authorisation when the signatory is someone else is a risk-control practice on the buyer’s side, not a description of what the law requires in every case.

Registered capital (注册资本)

The amount stated as capital, usually in renminbi; a foreign-invested enterprise may state it in a freely convertible currency. Implementing Rules, art. 13. This is the field that overseas buyers misread most easily.

For a limited liability company, registered capital generally records shareholders’ subscribed contributions, not its current cash or net assets. The five-year contribution rule applies to companies established from 1 July 2024, subject to statutory exceptions; earlier companies have transition rules. Company Law, art. 47, State Council, 2024. Companies limited by shares follow different contribution rules. Check disclosed contribution details as well as annual reports, and distinguish company-reported information from independently verified financial evidence.

In practice this means that the figure on the licence tells you what was subscribed, and the registry’s publicity record may show what the company reports as paid in. Enterprise Information Disclosure Regulations. Neither is a bank balance or an audited figure. Treat the number as an indication of the scale the founders declared, and nothing more.

Date of establishment (成立日期)

The date the entity was first registered. It tells you how long the legal entity has existed, not how long the people running it have been in the business, and it is not the same as the date the current licence was issued, which may be much later after a reissue. A company established last year may be a new vehicle for an experienced factory, or may be new in every sense. Cross-check against the supplier’s own account of its history; a “twenty-year factory” with a two-year-old entity has a question to answer, and the answer may be a straightforward restructuring.

Business term (营业期限)

Older licences may show a business term. The field was removed from the affected licence formats from September 2022. Check current records and subsequent changes before drawing conclusions from an older document. An end date on an old licence does not on its own tell you whether the entity is active today; the registry status does.

Registered address (住所)

The address on record with the registry. It is the entity’s legal domicile, which is not necessarily where production happens. A trading company may be registered at an office and work with factories elsewhere; a manufacturer may have a lawful production site that differs from its registered address. A difference between this address and the one on the quotation therefore has several possible explanations: a separate production site, a different entity, or a relocation that has not been recorded. The last of these is a registration matter the company should have dealt with, and is worth asking about rather than assuming. Where the supplier has described itself as a manufacturer at a specific site, ask how that site relates to the registered address and to the entity on the licence.

Business scope (经营范围)

A paragraph listing the activities the entity is registered to carry out. It is drafted broadly and is not a list of what the company actually does.

Two things are worth looking for. First, whether the scope covers the goods you are buying, at least in general terms; an entity registered only for consulting that quotes you machinery is worth a question. Second, whether it includes goods import and export (进出口 or 货物进出口). Read this carefully in both directions. The scope is not proof of export qualification: the general foreign-trade-operator filing was abolished at the end of 2022 (MOFCOM), and the current Foreign Trade Law, effective from March 2026, still requires licences for specific goods and other transaction-specific approvals (Foreign Trade Law). Equally, we are not aware of a rule under which the wording of the business scope alone decides whether an entity needs an export agent. Assess export capability by the goods, the entity and the actual export arrangement for your order.

Some scopes state that items subject to approval require a permit before operation (依法须经批准的项目，经相关部门批准后方可开展经营活动). Many licences carry this wording, and it means what it says: for goods or activities that need a licence, the entity must hold one, and the scope does not tell you whether it does.

Registration authority (登记机关)

The government office that issued the licence, usually a municipal or district market supervision administration (市场监督管理局). Check the issuing authority against the current registry record. The regional digits in the USCC may reflect an earlier registration location because the code remains unchanged after relocation, so a difference between the two is a reason to read the change history, not a contradiction in itself.

What the licence shows, and what it does not

A genuine licence issued by the registration authority reflects the registered particulars at the time it was issued: an entity with this name and this USCC was registered with this authority, with these details. That is what lets you identify the legal entity you are dealing with.

An image of a licence that has not been checked against the registry does not establish even that much on its own. It does not show that the entity is still registered today, that the image is unaltered, that the person sending it works for the entity, that any capital has been paid in, that the entity owns a factory, or that a bank account you were given belongs to it. Each of those is a separate question with a separate piece of evidence.

If you would like every field laid out side by side in Chinese and English, with the things to check next, upload the image to our free business licence reader. The image is sent to our model provider to read the fields and is not stored by us; see our Privacy page for what we keep.

What this guide does not cover

This guide explains how to read the document. It does not cover confirming the licence against the live registry, which requires a lookup of the Chinese-language public record, and it does not cover Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan entities, whose registration documents are different. It does not address the authenticity of seals or the detection of edited images, and it is not legal advice.

To see what is on record for the mainland company first, you can look it up in English by its English or Chinese name or its USCC. Finding it is free; the full English report of its registration and enforcement record is paid.

When you have read the licence and want the entity behind it checked against the registry and matched to your quotation and bank details, you can start a verification.