Your saved supplier record has a shelf life. We measured how short.

The numbers

1. The record moves — for most companies, within the year

Velocity measure	Result
Companies with at least one registered change	264 of 264 (100%)
Median lifetime change count (registry total)	39 (maximum observed: 124)
Amended within the last 12 months	145 of 264 = 54.9%
Amended within the last 24 months	207 of 264 = 78.4%
Median days since the most recent change	320

The 12-month rate is consistent across all three provincial excerpts — Shandong 52.2%, Anhui 56.6%, Yunnan 66.7% — so this is not one province’s paperwork habit. These are stable, state-vetted manufacturers with a median age of about 15 years, and even their records move this fast.

2. What moved in the last 12 months

Field changed within the last 12 months	Companies	Share of 264
Registered capital	50	18.9%
Business scope	41	15.5%
Legal representative / responsible person	31	11.7%

These are not clerical trivia. The registered capital moving in nearly one company in five fits the post-2024 pay-in timetable; the scope moving in one in six changes the first free signal buyers read; and the legal representative moving in one in nine means the name on last year’s licence photo may simply no longer be the registered one. The most frequent recent entries overall were articles-of-association and senior-management filings — routine governance, which is exactly the point: routine governance keeps rewriting the record.

3. What this does to a screenshot

A saved screenshot, an old licence photo or a colleague’s notes describe the company as it was on the capture date. With more than half of even elite companies amending their registration inside 12 months, an undated capture is not a slightly stale record — it is a coin flip on whether something material has moved since. This is the measured version of the rule every check on this site already applies: a change is a dated fact, and only the live record, read with its query date, describes the company you are paying today.

Method: the same census, one more variable

• The frame. Identical to the registration study: all 264 companies on three official provincial-government excerpts of MIIT’s sixth “Little Giant” batch (Shandong 136, Anhui 113, Yunnan 15). A census of the frame — no sampling within it.
• The lookups. Each company’s registered-change log was queried once through a licensed commercial registry-data API on 8 August 2026, from our China-side desk. We recorded the registry’s lifetime change total and, for each company, the dates and category labels of its twenty most recent entries.
• Privacy at collection. Change entries carry before-and-after content that can contain personal names. Those content fields were discarded at collection — the dataset holds change dates and category labels only, consistent with China’s personal-information rules and our editorial policy.
• Field-level counts are lower bounds. The per-field 12-month numbers are computed within each company’s twenty most recent entries. A company that logged more than twenty changes in twelve months would have older entries pushed out of that window, so the true shares can only be equal or higher.

What these numbers do not say

• Change is not distress. Nothing here says these companies are unstable — most recent entries are routine governance filings. The finding is about the record’s freshness, not the companies’ health. A change is a dated fact, not a supplier verdict.
• Not a picture of marketplace suppliers. This is an elite, state-vetted manufacturer frame. Whether marketplace suppliers’ records move faster or slower is not measured here.
• Not national. Three provinces of thirty-one, as in the registration study. The cross-province consistency is reassuring, not conclusive.
• One day, one source. All lookups are dated 8 August 2026 through one licensed data channel, and category labels follow that channel’s taxonomy.

What a buyer does with this

1. Date every capture. A record without its query date is unusable a year later — and half of these companies changed something within a year.
2. Re-read the live record at each decision gate — shortlist, order, payment — rather than reusing the file from the last one. The official search steps show what to compare.
3. When a supplier sends an old document, ask which version was current at the step that matters, and check the current record yourself — or have it read China-side, with the source and query date named per line.

Citing this study

Quote or reproduce these figures freely, including commercially, provided the query date (8 August 2026), the frame (264 companies, three provincial excerpts of MIIT’s sixth “Little Giant” batch) and the stated limits travel with them.

Currawong Web, “How often Chinese company records change”, census of registered-change logs for 264 companies on three official provincial excerpts of MIIT’s sixth ‘Little Giant’ batch, queried 8 August 2026. https://currawongweb.com/verify/china-company-record-change-study/

If you re-run this on another frame or date and get different numbers, we want to hear it — corrections that survive checking get published here with attribution, including ones that contradict us.

This page reports aggregate change-log statistics. It is not legal advice, and it says nothing about any individual company’s stability, honesty or suitability.