Before you rely on any checkIncluding ours
A clean registration record proves the company exists. It does not prove you are safe.
Every verification service, ours included, has an incentive to let you read “the record checks out” as “this supplier is fine”. Those are different statements, and the gap between them is where buyers lose money. This page sets out what a registry check settles and what it cannot reach — not as a disclaimer buried in terms, but as the first thing you should know.
1. A registered company can still be a shell
Registering a company in China is inexpensive and quick. A recurring pattern described across sourcing-industry accounts is that an operator registers a genuine entity and then builds fabricated credentials around it — catalogue photos taken from a real factory, certificates that were never issued, a storefront that looks established.
When you look that entity up, the record is clean, because the entity is real. Nothing in a registration file records an intention to perform. The registry has no field for “will honour the order”.
This is also why a check cannot catch the pattern where a supplier fulfils several small orders correctly to build trust, then disappears on a large one. Up to the moment it happens, every record reads normally.
2. A genuine licence can belong to somebody else
One of the documented ways a business licence is misused is not forgery at all: the document is authentic and internally consistent, but it is not the licence of the party you are talking to. It may be copied from a real company’s published materials, or borrowed from an affiliate.
Check that licence against the registry and everything matches — because everything on it is true. What the registry cannot tell you is whether the person emailing you has any connection to the entity on the page.
This limit is structural, not a gap in our data. No registry lookup, ours or anyone’s, can bridge it. What narrows it is comparing the entity against the other things in front of you: the name on the payment account, the entity behind the storefront, the party named in the contract, the company on the invoice. When those four disagree, that is information a lookup alone would never surface.
3. Registration is not capability, and some fields are weaker than they look
A registration file states what was filed, on the day it was read. It is not evidence of production capacity, quality systems, or solvency. Several fields buyers lean on are weaker signals than they appear:
- Registered capital is a subscribed figure, not money in an account. Since the 2014 reform it can be committed without being paid in.
- Business scope is checked at registration. It can drift from what a company actually does over the years that follow.
- Company name wording carries less than English intuition suggests. “厂” (chang) is an organisational form, not proof of manufacturing; “实业” (shiye) means the name spans several industry categories, not that the company is “industrial”.
- A trading company in the chain is not automatically a problem. Many factories export through a trading entity for ordinary commercial reasons. The pattern is common and lawful; it is only a concern when you were told you were dealing with the factory directly.
Certificates — ISO, audit reports, customer lists — sit entirely outside the registry. A registry check says nothing about whether any of them are genuine.
4. The step where money is actually lost
Most losses do not happen when the contract is signed. They happen at payment — and several distinct fraud patterns converge on one weakness: the account you were told to pay is not held by the company you verified. Requests to redirect payment to a newly named account, often offshore and often under a slightly different name, are a long-documented pattern; so is a request to pay a personal account.
A registry check cannot see bank accounts. What it can give you is the exact registered name to compare the account name against — and that comparison is the one thing on this page that a lookup genuinely makes possible. The free check now includes that comparison.
A registry check also cannot help if your own systems are compromised, if an unauthorised individual is collecting payment, or if documents under a letter of credit are falsified. Those are real losses with real mechanisms — they are simply not questions a company register answers.
What a registry check does settle
Having said all of that plainly, the check is not weak — it is specific. It answers questions that nothing else you have will answer:
- Does this entity exist at all, and is it still a legal person today? A company that was deregistered cannot contract in its own name. One whose licence was revoked but that has not been deregistered still exists — a distinction that changes what you are signing.
- Is the name you were given the registered one, character for character, or a trading name, a former name, or an English name with no legal standing?
- Do the details on the licence you were shown match the register — the 18-character code, the establishment date, the registered capital?
- Does the payment account name match the registered name?
Those are narrow questions. They are also the ones where a wrong answer costs you the whole order, and they are answerable before any money moves.
Not legal advice, not a credit rating, not a factory audit, and not a recommendation of any supplier. A record check reports what was filed and when it was read.