Using a Hong Kong Company for Your Chinese Factory

Tired of sourcing from factories and want to setup your own manufacturing operation? Searching for the best corporate structure for a new factory?

Look no further, today we will dig into Hong Kong being a great place to open your factory under.

I remember when I first visited a factory in China. I became shocked to think it isn’t as complicated as I had thought. There are three main factors:

Of course there is a lot more skill and magic to the process, but these are the main pieces of the puzzle you’ll be dealing with.

A lot of people ask me when they’re searching on Alibaba should they pick companies that are in Mainland China or Hong Kong. Yet I don’t know any factories still located in Hong Kong – they are all in China. What is in Hong Kong is the sales office, or even just a virtual office for the parent company.

That’s not to say having your factory established in Hong Kong as a business entity isn’t viable. It is something common. It can be with anyone, Americans, Europeans, Local Hong Kong people, or Mainland Chinese who open the HK limited company. It will not be too easy for the general public to know the nationality of the owners (though there are ways to do company research in Hong Kong). Once you’re a Hong Kong company, you can then open a Mainland Chinese WFOE (Wholly Foreign Owned Entity) that will be where the factory operates from.

You can have a local Chinese partner in the factory with you, and you can both own the shares in Hong Kong. Once that is setup, you will then be “foreign” to the Chinese government even if half the company is Mainland Chinese owned. So you’ll open a Chinese subsidiary that is the fully owned by Hong Kong company. Have the IP owned by the HK parent company, and now you have the benefits of HK’s English legal system while able to operate inside China.

While any company could be the foreign owner of a WFOE in China, Hong Kong is a good choice as it is so close and so common. Hong Kong banks, and other banks and legal entities will be familiar with how to file the documentation. Thus the WFOE won’t have as much of a headache as having it owned by a company elsewhere.

Make sense?

So what are you going to need for this Chinese factory owned by a HK limited company?

It depends, will you have a physical office in Hong Kong? To do sales, meeting clients, trade shows, etc? Or will you work close with a serviced office in HK that will help with the mail from the governments and banks.

I’m going to assume you’ll be living and working in the Chinese factory, and that will be your base. You won’t need the overhead of a Hong Kong office and will instead invest in Mainland China operations.

Thus, you won’t need many things in the Hong Kong company, most operations will happen in Mainland China.

But you’ll definitely need:

So now you did it, you setup a Hong Kong company and then a Chinese WFOE subsidiary. Good job! That took at least 4 months, but more likely 6 months. You may have done some operations already, but now you’re fully legal to do it.

You’ll rent a big space in the outskirts of Shenzhen or in Dongguan. You have your sales team there – and the internet speeds are reasonable for dealing with foreign clients. You have orders coming in. Once the money is in Hong Kong, you can either wire the money on demand to China. A lot of companies work out a monthly invoice for costs of operations and production.

Once you send the money to your Chinese bank from your Hong Kong bank, you order the raw materials and get the factory workers trained up to handle the production. You may need to hire more staff or scale down when production is low. I hope you have a core manufacturing team in place with good experienced factory management.

You process the order. You finish mass production and then send remaining funds to your Hong Kong parent company’s bank from the client. You need to get more cash over to China to finish the deal and get it to the port, FOB Shenzhen.

You will keep some money in China, but you hold your money and IP in the parent company in Hong Kong.

This is the basic idea. Sure the factory can be over in Shanghai, or deeper into Mainland China as well. Where you choose the factory location should base on the type of product and industry you’re in. There are cities who specialize in certain areas.

Hope this guide was helpful for you! Where are you opening up your own factory. Often the order of events is a USA import and export company grows bigger and bigger. Getting more clients and specializing more, they want to go even more direct. Since they know their product so well and their customers too, they can invest in a factory themselves.

Sure, this will have more fixed costs and more risky, but you’ll have full control. The trickiest part is to managing the staff and the quality control. All that complaining you did to those factories you bought from before will now be your headache! Its not always the factory owner who does the bad quality on purpose. It takes good management skills to keep things in order and deliver top quality.

So I’d love to hear your experiences and tips about Chinese factories from a Hong Kong company. Please leave comments and questions below!