Consolidated Business Operating Licence Gets State Council Approval

As part of ongoing reforms to the country’s business system, the State Council has approved moves to consolidate operating licences, remove the requirement for pre-approval when registering businesses and to mitigate impact of government-related costs across the commercial sector.

Essentially, the move covers three principal initiatives:

• Steps will be taken to consolidate the existing requirement for multiples licenses into just one. This follows the successful implementation of the “five-in-one” license last year. This saw one document accepted as a business licence, an organisational code certificate, a social insurance registration certificate, a tax registration certificate and a statistics registration certificate. This will be expanded to include market entity registration, while also being acceptable for record filing purposes as well as for several other applications. The bodies concerned will act to build awareness of this new consolidated licence, while a single identifying number will be adopted for all relevant purposes.

• Inter-departmental information sharing will be expanded in order to deliver one-off information collection and file management, ensuring businesses are not required to submit the same data for multiple legal purposes.

• The need for five categories of business to secure pre-approval will be replaced by the granting of post-establishment approval. This will extends to such businesses as wholly foreign-owned packaging and printing operations.

For further information (in Chinese), please refer to the following website:

Executive Meeting on 26 April Decided on These Three Things