How to find a reliable supplier in China

Every company legally registered in mainland China holds a 营业执照 (business licence). It is not a certificate a supplier applies for to impress buyers; it is the thing that makes the company exist. Asking for a clear photograph of it is a completely normal request and a supplier who deflects it is telling you something.

Registered name, in Chinese. The Chinese name is the legal identity. English trading names are marketing and are not registered — two companies can use the same English name and neither owns it. Every later check keys off the Chinese name, so record it exactly, characters and all.

The Unified Social Credit Code (统一社会信用代码). Eighteen characters, letters and digits, unique to the company and printed on the licence. This is the company's national identifier and the field you search the state register with. It is the closest thing to a company number that a mainland entity has.

The business scope (经营范围). A paragraph listing what the company is registered to do. It is the single most useful field on the document and the next section is about why.

Registered capital (注册资本) and the establishment date (成立日期). Together they tell you how long the company has existed and how much its shareholders have committed to putting into it — which, since 2024, means something quite different from what it used to.

Then verify the licence against the source rather than against itself. The national register at gsxt.gov.cn — the 国家企业信用信息公示系统, operated by the State Administration for Market Regulation — publishes the registration record for every mainland company, free, with no account. A licence is a printout; the register is the record. If a photograph and the register disagree, the register is right and you have learned something important.

For a decade, registered capital on a Chinese licence meant almost nothing. China moved to a pure subscription system in 2014: shareholders declared a figure, no deadline attached, and nobody had to produce the money. A company could register ¥50 million and hold ¥0. Every sourcing guide written since then says the number is meaningless, and until recently that was fair.

It changed on 1 July 2024. The revised Company Law — passed 29 December 2023, in force 1 July 2024 — says at Article 47 that the capital subscribed by all shareholders of a limited liability company must be paid up in full within five years of the company's establishment. Article 98 goes further for joint-stock companies: their promoters must pay in full before the company is established at all.

Companies registered before that date got a transition period, not an exemption. The State Council regulation implementing the capital rules, signed and effective on 1 July 2024, sets a three-year transition running to 30 June 2027. A pre-existing limited company whose remaining subscription period still exceeds five years as at 1 July 2027 has to bring it inside five years before the transition ends, and a pre-existing joint-stock company has to pay its share capital up in full within the same window.

What that means when you are reading a licence. A large registered capital is still a promise rather than cash in a bank — but it is now a promise with a statutory deadline behind it, and an implausibly large figure on a small company is a liability its shareholders have to fund or formally reduce. The register publishes capital reductions, so a company that quietly shrank a headline number leaves a trace you can see.

What it does not mean: it is not a credit check, and a paid-up figure is not evidence of solvency today. Use it as one input into how seriously the shareholders take the entity, not as a substitute for payment terms that protect you.

The business scope on the licence is written by the company at registration and approved by the registrar, and it is the only place the distinction is recorded in a form nobody can improvise.

A manufacturer's scope names production. Look for 生产 (production), 制造 (manufacturing) or 加工 (processing), usually attached to a product category — "生产、加工：电子产品" and so on. Some scopes are broad, but production verbs appear because the company registered to do production.

A reseller's scope names commerce only. 销售 (sales), 批发 (wholesale), 贸易 (trade), 进出口 (import and export). A company with no production verb in its scope is not registered to manufacture, whatever the website says about "our factory".

Read this as one signal, not a verdict. Some groups run a manufacturing entity and a separate export entity, and it is the export entity you are invoiced by — which is legitimate and extremely common. The right response is not suspicion, it is a question: which entity makes the goods, and can I see that entity's licence too? A supplier with a real factory answers that in a sentence. A reseller who has been claiming otherwise does not.

Then corroborate with things a reseller cannot fake cheaply. Ask for a live video walk of the production line — unedited, on request, at a time you choose, not a file they send. Ask which machines run the process and how many, ask what the tooling change takes, ask who owns the mould. Ask for the test report for a product you have not mentioned before, and see whether the report names the same company as the licence. A factory answers these from memory. A middleman goes away and comes back.

It is also why this marketplace lists manufacturers only. Every supplier on this site is a factory — no trading companies are listed, not even free ones — and the business scope (经营范围) check above is one of the things checked before a listing goes live.

Bank account name must equal company name. This is the highest-value check on the page. Payment instructions for a legitimate Chinese exporter name the registered company, at a mainland bank, in the same name as the licence. A request to pay a personal account, a Hong Kong account belonging to a differently named company, or an account whose name is "close enough" is the single most common thread in stories that end badly. Treat any change of bank details mid-order as a compromise until proven otherwise, and confirm it by voice on a number you already had, not on the email that announced it.

Check the domain, not the website. A supplier corresponding from a free mailbox for a company that claims twenty years of exports has a gap to explain. So does a domain registered a few months ago. Neither is proof of anything on its own; both are cheap to check and both change how carefully you read everything else.

Confirm the entity is still alive. The state register shows registration status. A company in 吊销 (licence revoked) or 注销 (deregistered) status is not a supplier, and the register is where that shows up first.

Compare the sample to the specification, not to the photograph. The photograph is the seller's best case; the specification is the agreement. Where a standard applies, the sample and the paperwork have to name the same standard — and a test report is issued to a named company for a named product, so a report whose subject is not the product you are buying, from a company that is not the one invoicing you, is not evidence about your order.

Never let the first order be the big one. A pilot order that costs you something you can afford to lose, shipped and inspected properly, tells you more about a supplier than any amount of document checking — because it is the only test that includes whether they do what they said when it becomes inconvenient.

Every check above tests whether a company exists, what it is registered to do and whether it is who it says. None of them tests whether it will do a good job on your order, and confusing the two is the most common way a careful buyer still gets a bad outcome.

Capability is a different question. Whether the factory has run your product class before, whether your tolerances are ordinary or hard for them, whether your volume is interesting or a nuisance at the bottom of their book — none of that appears on any register. It appears in a technical conversation, in a sample against a drawing, and in the questions they ask you back.

Willingness is a third question again, and it is the one that decides how the relationship goes when something breaks. A factory that says "we cannot hit that tolerance at that price" before you order is more valuable than one that agrees to everything and manages the gap quietly during production.

Which is why the document checks come first rather than last. They are free, they take an afternoon, and they remove the entities that cannot survive them — so that the expensive work of judging capability is spent only on companies that are real.