Company secretary, registered address, and annual filings – for your Hong Kong, China, or Singapore company.

In Hong Kong and Singapore, yes – a registered address through a licensed provider is standard practice for non-licensed industries (consulting, trading, services, marketing). The address handles government correspondence and is sufficient for opening a fintech account. We provide registered addresses in both jurisdictions.

The exception: licensed financial businesses, such as a money service operator (MSO) or a securities firm, and applications to high-street banks in Hong Kong or Singapore – most regulators and most major banks require a physical office lease, not a virtual address. On the initial call we tell you whether your case needs a physical office.

In China, a WFOE can be registered at a virtual office – but that limits banking options, and a virtual address won’t qualify for VAT export refunds later. Common practice: rent a virtual or incubator office for the first few months, then switch to a physical office once operations grow.

In Hong Kong, the NAR1 late-filing fee starts at HKD 870 and escalates with time past the deadline; a late Business Registration renewal brings its own penalty, and a bank will not open an account for a company whose certificate has expired. In China, missing the AMR Annual Report by 30 June puts the company on the Abnormal Operations List. In Singapore, ACRA may issue a late-filing fee, then a summons (up to S$5,000 for the company and officers in default).

Our work is to make sure these deadlines are met. Every deadline is on our calendar from day one, and we start preparing each filing weeks before the window closes.

It depends on the jurisdiction – and the gap between Hong Kong/Singapore and China is significant.

Hong Kong and Singapore – relatively straightforward. A change of director or shareholder is filed with the Companies Registry (HK) or ACRA (SG), and so is a new registered address. For share transfers in Hong Kong, stamp duty of 0.2% applies on the value transferred. Most director-change filings are completed remotely within days; a Hong Kong share transfer, with stamp-duty processing, takes one to two weeks.

China (WFOE) – a different scale of complexity. An equity transfer starts with a shareholder or board resolution, followed by the tax filing on the transfer gain with the State Taxation Administration. Then comes the AMR equity-change registration, and finally the company’s foreign-exchange registration is updated at its bank. It takes eight to fourteen weeks start to finish; most of that time goes to the tax and bank steps. The seller pays tax on the gain – 10% withholding tax for a corporate seller, 20% income tax for an individual.

Changing the legal representative (the 法定代表人) in a WFOE is its own document-heavy process: an Articles of Association amendment and a board resolution go to AMR with the application. After the filing, the practical work begins – updating banks, tax authorities, company seals, and operating licences. Local examiners interpret the rules differently across cities and districts, so the timeline depends on where the WFOE is registered.

Before anything is filed, we explain the full sequence to you.

Beyond the annual filings, we handle:

• Apostille, document translation, and legalisation
• Issuing or obtaining a certificate of good standing (in Hong Kong, a Certificate of Continuing Registration), share certificates, lease contracts, or other non-standard documents a bank or counterparty might ask for
• Statutory register reconstruction when records have fallen out of sync – for example after a takeover from a previous provider
• Coordination with the registry on official correspondence – objections, queries, document requests from Companies Registry, ACRA, or AMR
• Voluntary deregistration / closure – in China this includes the tax-clearance step, which is typically the longest piece at three to six months
• Dormant company maintenance – keeping a paused Hong Kong company in good standing at the minimum required service level
• Corporate-record changes and Business Licence amendments – ownership, business scope, registered capital, company name, legal representative, registered address
• VAT export refund filings
• Import-export licence registration for China WFOEs
• Trademark registration