For a foreign-invested enterprise (FIE) in China, receiving the business license only confirms that the company legally exists — it does not mean the company is ready to operate. It cannot yet sign contracts, collect payments, issue invoices, or put anyone on payroll. A string of follow-on steps still has to be completed before any of that is possible. Some of these are routine formalities that apply to any company; others are specific to foreign investment, touching foreign exchange registration, capital accounts, and verification of the offshore shareholders’ identity. This article walks through those steps roughly in the order they need to happen, along with the points worth watching at each stage
Engraving and Registering the Company Seals
The company needs to engrave a set of official seals — the company seal, the finance seal, the invoice seal, and the contract seal, with some localities also requiring a legal representative’s signature seal — and register them through the police-designated seal-engraving system. Most cities now fold seal engraving into the “one-stop business registration” service, processed alongside the business license itself, which usually makes it the fastest step in the sequence.
Opening the Basic RMB Bank Account
The basic deposit account is the company’s primary account for settlements and cash receipts and payments, and it is the precondition for lawfully collecting or making payments at all. Opening it requires the business license, the company seals, and identification for the legal representative, and the bank will review the ownership structure and ultimate beneficial owner as part of its anti-money-laundering and customer due diligence checks. For an FIE, this step typically also calls for identity documents and corporate registration certificates for the offshore shareholders — documents originating overseas, which generally need to be notarized and legalized (or authenticated through whatever channel is recognized between China and the home jurisdiction) before a Chinese bank will accept them. It pays to prepare these well ahead of time, since scrambling to get documents notarized after the fact is one of the more common causes of delay. Until the basic account is open, the company cannot receive or make payments through a corporate account at all — which is itself one of the main reasons a freshly issued license doesn’t equal a company ready to trade.
Confirming Tax Registration and Activating Invoicing
Tax registration information is usually generated automatically once the business license is issued, through data-sharing between government departments. The company still needs to log into the e-Tax Bureau and check every field — unified social credit code, legal representative, person in charge of finance, tax handler, business address, bank account, and the tax types the company has been assigned — and complete real-name verification for whoever will be handling tax matters. Once that’s confirmed, the company has to separately apply for invoicing rights before it can issue any invoices. The rollout of fully digitalized e-invoices has simplified the application process itself, but real-name verification remains a common sticking point in practice when the legal representative or the person responsible for finance holds a foreign identity document, since the verification channel for foreign IDs differs from the one used for domestic ID cards. It’s worth checking with the local tax authority early on how that verification will work, rather than discovering the gap only once invoicing is actually needed.
Foreign Exchange Registration and the Capital Account
This is a step that has no equivalent for a domestically owned company: the FIE needs to register with the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) capital-account information system to obtain a registration code, and then open a foreign exchange capital account to receive the registered capital remitted in by the overseas shareholders. Opening this account also calls for the overseas shareholders’ identity documents and the company’s articles of association, and the process typically needs to be coordinated with the opening of the basic RMB account. Once capital lands in the account, the company can choose when to convert it into RMB under the “discretionary settlement” framework — but the resulting RMB funds carry use restrictions: they cannot go toward securities investment outside the company’s registered business scope, cannot be used to buy non-self-use real estate, and cannot be lent on to non-affiliated parties. It is worth keeping a separate ledger tracking exactly what the converted funds are used for, so there is a clear record on hand if it is ever questioned.
Paying In the Registered Capital
Under the current Company Law, a limited liability company’s shareholders must pay in their subscribed registered capital in full within five years of incorporation, and this applies to FIEs the same as any other company — paid in according to the contribution method (cash, in kind, technology, and so on) and timeline set out in the articles of association, whether in installments or all at once. It is worth mapping out a realistic payment schedule and funding source at the time of incorporation, since falling behind on the agreed timeline exposes the shareholder to claims from co-shareholders and, in some cases, to the obligation being accelerated. For an FIE contributing capital in cash, this step needs to be coordinated with the opening and conversion of the foreign exchange capital account described above — the two should be planned together, not treated as separate tracks.
Registering for Social Insurance and the Housing Fund
Once the company plans to hire, it needs to register for social insurance and the housing provident fund before anyone starts work, and then make the required contributions on their behalf. This part is a universal requirement, but an FIE that intends to second staff in from overseas also needs to line up work permits and residence permits for those employees at the same time — and it’s easy to overlook how the employment registration and the immigration paperwork need to fit together, so it is worth planning that overlap in advance rather than treating them as two unrelated tasks.
Filing the Foreign Investment Information Report
After making its first capital contribution, an FIE also has a separate reporting obligation to the commerce authorities. Starting in 2025, the Ministry of Commerce has been piloting a “Foreign Investment Information Report” in parts of the country to replace the earlier “FIE Joint Annual Report” regime, and the company should confirm at the outset which version applies to it, along with the reporting cycle and the platform it needs to file through. This sits entirely outside tax registration, and it is easy for a company to assume that finishing tax registration covers this filing too — it doesn’t, and that assumption is a common way this step gets missed.
Industry-Specific Licensing (Where Applicable)
If the company operates in a sector listed as restricted on the foreign investment access negative list, or in an industry that requires its own operating license, it will need a separate approval or license from the relevant industry regulator before it can actually start that line of business, even after the business license is in hand. This step varies enormously by sector, so it is worth confirming during the planning stage whether a specific license applies and building in enough time for that approval process.
Closing Note
Only once these steps are done does a company actually have the practical ability to sign contracts, collect payments, issue invoices, and employ staff — the business license itself is just the starting point of legal existence. For FIEs specifically, the extra links in this chain — foreign exchange registration, the capital account, verifying offshore identities, and the information filing — tend to be the ones that cause delays, more so than the routine formalities every company goes through. It is worth mapping out the full timeline during the planning stage, rather than working through each step only after the license has already been issued.