"Fifteen Years Experience." Registered Two Months Ago.
How can you tell if a Chinese supplier really has the experience and factory they claim?
Pull the government registration record and read three fields: the date of establishment, the insured employee count, and the registered capital. A company claiming fifteen years of manufacturing that was registered last year is not a factory with history. A company claiming a large plant that reports zero insured employees has no workforce. And when the business license the supplier hands you shows different capital than the public record, stop — the paper and the registry are telling you two different stories, and only one of them is the truth.
That's the short answer. Here's the case it comes from.
A client was days from placing a seven-figure order. He'd done the calls, seen the photos, and been told what everyone gets told: fifteen years in the business, a large factory, plenty of export experience.
He asked us to run a check first. Routine, in his mind. A box to tick before the wire.
What the record actually said
The company had been registered for just over two months.
Not fifteen years. Not five. Two months. And it wasn't registered as a manufacturer — the business scope read as a trading company. There was no factory behind it because there had never been time to build one.
Then the annual report: zero insured employees. No staff on the books at all. A company claiming a large production operation had not a single person registered as employed.
The discrepancy that ended it
The business license the supplier had sent the client showed registered capital of RMB 1,000,000.
The public government record showed RMB 100,000.
A factor of ten, between the document in the client's inbox and the record in the national registry. There are innocent explanations for a gap like that — a recent capital increase not yet reflected, a data-entry error. There's also the explanation nobody wants: the license had been altered before it was sent.
We didn't guess which. We told the client exactly what to demand — the official registration certificate, direct from the government system, confirming the real figure. A genuine company produces that in an afternoon.
The verdict
Red. Do not proceed, do not wire, and don't resolve it over WeChat. Get the official record, an explanation for the zero headcount, proof of paid-in capital, and bank details that match the registered entity name — before any money moves.
Seven figures, stopped at the last minute.
The lesson
- "Years of experience" is a sentence, not a fact. The date of establishment is a fact, and it takes minutes to look up. Anyone claiming a decade of history has a registration date that either supports it or destroys it.
- Zero insured employees means no workforce. Not a small workforce — none on record. A company describing a large plant while reporting no staff is describing something that doesn't exist.
- When the license and the registry disagree, believe the registry. The supplier controls what document reaches your inbox. He doesn't control the government database. That asymmetry is the whole value of checking.
- The size of the order is exactly why the check matters. Nobody runs due diligence on a $3,000 sample order. Seven figures is when the cost of being wrong stops being survivable — and it's precisely when a two-month-old trading company most wants to be mistaken for a fifteen-year factory.
Names withheld. Company identifiers removed. Full registration record and report on file.
About to place a large order with a supplier you haven't verified? Supplier Reality Check™ runs the record. Bigger commitment, deeper picture? Due Diligence. Or go back to all Case Files.