Loading...

A client asks us to look at a supplier. Before dates, before flights, before anything that costs money, we ask for one thing: the address.

Sometimes the client already has it — in an email signature, at the foot of a quotation, sitting in a file he has been building for weeks without reading it as evidence. Sometimes we go and find it ourselves. Either way it ends up next to the registered address on the business licence (营业执照), and then we open a map. That is the whole method. It is not clever; it is only that almost nobody does it, because the addresses arrive one at a time, weeks apart, in different documents, and nothing ever puts them side by side.

On the conveyor belt supplier that eventually cost a mining client a great deal of attention, the map said something before we had spoken to anybody. The commercial team sat in a city. The plant they called their own sat in a county down the coast. That is not one company at one place; it is two pieces of ground with a journey between them, and one of them lands on an office floor. Nothing about that is illegal, and plenty of good suppliers look exactly like it. But it turned a vague phrase — our factory — into two specific locations, and it decided which questions we asked when we got there.

Everything else in this series happens after you land. This one is about the half hour before you book.

What Ten Minutes at a Desk Buys You

A supplier visit is not expensive because of the flight. It is expensive because of the days: visas, connections, a night either side, two or three working days you do not get back. You have a limited number of those, so every supplier you fly to is one you did not fly to instead.

Against that, ten minutes at a desk settles a surprising amount. Whether the company legally exists and still trades. Whether it told its own government that it manufactures. Whether its registered address is a plant, an office floor or a flat. How much ground the site covers and how many people it insures. None of that needs you in the room.

It does not replace the visit; it decides which visit is worth making, and hands you the agenda for the day. It is also one of the few parts of this process nobody arranged for you: the register is what the company filed about itself to a regulator, and the satellite layer was photographed without anyone being asked.

Four Addresses, and They Are Often Four Different Places

Ask in writing, early, before travel dates enter the conversation, for the full Chinese company name (中文公司全名) exactly as it appears on the licence — not the English trading name from the website — the 18-character unified social credit code (统一社会信用代码), and the addresses below. A supplier with a clean structure sends all of it the same day, because none of it costs him anything.

A fifth matters once money moves: the registered address of whichever company is named on the bank account. That one has its own article, and it is the one that ends deals.

Four different answers is not a finding. Four different answers that nobody mentioned is the start of one.

What to Look Up: the Register First, Then the Map

China publishes company registration data free, to anybody, with no account: the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System at www.gsxt.gov.cn, run by the State Administration for Market Regulation. It is Chinese only; browser translation copes. Search by the 18-character code, not the name — name searches are fuzzy and return long lists of near-identical companies, which is how buyers end up reading a stranger’s record and concluding everything is fine.

Then the map. Paste the Chinese address string, not a translation — an English rendering will not resolve. Inside China the address data lives in Baidu Maps (百度地图) and Amap (高德地图); from outside, the mainstream international apps carry satellite coverage of the same ground even where they cannot parse the Chinese address. Use the Chinese apps to find the point, then look at it from above.

Cross-checking the story against the ground

The map alone is scenery. It becomes evidence next to what you were told. Compare the footprint — workshop roofs, yard, material stacked outside, parking — against the capacity they claim; roof area is the honest measure of a production site, and stacked material says it is in use. Compare the insured headcount (参保人数) and the parking area against the workforce they describe; both measures are rough, but both being small at once stops being rough. Check whether any entity in the group is registered near the plant they call their own, and if none is, ask who runs it. And count how many companies share that registered address — dozens is a registration agent rather than a conspiracy, but it means the address tells you nothing.

Shared-address counts and shareholder links read more easily on Qichacha (企查查) and Tianyancha (天眼查) — Chinese-language, partly paid, and only a convenient view of the same public filings.

When the Addresses Don’t Match and Nothing Is Wrong

This is the part most supplier-verification advice leaves out, and leaving it out costs buyers good suppliers.

A gap between the registered address and the production address is closer to the default than to a warning, and the ordinary explanations are strong:

• Registration follows policy; production follows land. Companies register where a district or park offers them something and produce where land and power are cheapest. The two were never meant to be the same place.
• Cluster registration (集群注册). Incubators and parks supply registration addresses as a service, and local governments encourage it. A young company with a shared address is doing what it was told to do.
• Leased workshops. The plant is real, the land is somebody else’s, and leases move. A very large share of Chinese manufacturing works this way.
• The register lags reality. A company that moved last year may not have refiled — sloppy administration far more often than cover.
• Assembly operations. Some suppliers are not manufacturers in the sense you are picturing. Their skill is selecting and controlling component suppliers and building the finished unit themselves — a real model with real advantages. They buy components competitively instead of being stuck with whatever their own line can produce, and they are far more flexible than a large plant on small batches, spec changes and delivery dates. Some of the best price-and-quality combinations we source come from exactly this kind of company. Their capital sits in jigs, test rigs, stock and supplier relationships, none of which has a roof you can measure from orbit — so an assembler always looks thin from above, and that says nothing about what they can build.

Three honest limits on the satellite view itself: the imagery is dated, often by years, so an empty yard is not an empty yard today; a big compound is not their compound, because estates have landlords and your supplier may occupy one bay; and street-level imagery in China is patchy where it exists at all.

So the finding is never the verdict. The question is not whether the addresses line up. It is whether anybody went out of their way to stop you noticing that they don’t. An honest answer to why is your registered address a city office? takes one sentence and is usually boring — the group registered there, the park gave us the address, we moved and haven’t refiled. Boring is what you are hoping for. The answer that should slow you down is the one that changes the subject.

When the Answer Is “Don’t Get on the Plane”

Most of this produces a question to ask over tea. A short list is different — reasons to postpone the trip until they are resolved, because no building can answer them and you would be flying to look at the wrong thing:

• The entity is revoked (吊销) or deregistered (注销). You would be visiting a building, not a counterparty.
• It is on the abnormal operations register (经营异常名录) for being unreachable at its registered address, with no explanation offered.
• They will not give you the Chinese name and the 18-character code. One message, no cost to them; the refusal is the finding.
• The business scope has no manufacturing, they insist they manufacture, and the question gets deflected twice.
• Nobody will say whose site the invitation address is — theirs, rented, or a partner’s.
• The register, the map and the story cannot all be true at once, and nobody will say which is wrong.

Note what is not on that list, because these are the false alarms that make buyers cancel good trips: a thin footprint from above, a registered address in an office tower, an incubator address, a young company, an address that will not geocode, an empty-looking yard in old imagery.

The rest of this series covers what you can only learn once you have landed:

• Office, factory and bank account turning out to be three companies — the payment-side version of this problem.
• What the first sixty seconds at the gate tell you, before anyone knows you have arrived.
• Whether the person showing you round actually works there, tested by asking for small ordinary things.
• What it means when your contact cancels at the last minute and the factory receives you instead.
• What the distance between office and plant really costs you, once you know how rarely anyone crosses it.

What We Do With It: Score It, Don’t Veto It

Nobody should drop a supplier because his registered address is a floor in an office block, and we do not. What these findings mostly do is set the agenda for the day you spend there — which is the whole reason to run them before booking rather than after.

Two things then get re-priced. Price risk: an extra entity in the structure means a margin somewhere, which is a cost conversation rather than an accusation — the same one as negotiating factory prices without losing quality. Quality risk: any operation happening at an address you have not seen is outside your inspection unless you write it into the plan, which is the standing difficulty of running quality control from another country.

Then we score the supplier against others in the same tier. A company with a shared registered address that explains the arrangement in one sentence, names its landlord and lets you inspect incoming parts routinely beats a larger firm with a tidier filing and vaguer answers. Findings are deductions, not death sentences. The one thing you must not do is carry an unexplained address into a deposit: score it, price it, or ask about it — but do not decide it was scenery.

The Ten Minutes Before You Book Anything

Run this while the trip is still a suggestion.

• [ ] Ask in writing for the Chinese company name, the 18-character code, the registered address and the production address
• [ ] Ask which address you are being invited to, and whose site it is
• [ ] Look the company up by code at gsxt.gov.cn: status, address, scope, date of establishment
• [ ] Check the abnormal operations register, and read the reason if there is an entry
• [ ] Open the annual report and note the insured headcount (参保人数)
• [ ] Paste each Chinese address into a Chinese mapping app and see what it lands on
• [ ] Switch to the satellite layer: roofs, yard, stacked material, parking
• [ ] Compare footprint against the capacity claim, headcount against the workforce claim
• [ ] Check how many other companies share the registered address
• [ ] Write every gap down as a question, not as a conclusion
• [ ] Decide what the trip is for — if the remaining questions can be answered by email, send the email instead

The deeper desk work — shareholders, customs standing, court enforcement — sits in our company due diligence workflow; the trip itself is in the one-day factory audit checklist, the supplier risk scorecard turns it into a number instead of a feeling, our notes on visiting a Chinese factory when you don’t speak Chinese cover the interpreter briefing, and the money-side controls are in our guide to protecting payments on machinery orders from China.

Ask for the addresses before you ask for dates. It is the cheapest hour in the whole relationship, and the only one where nobody is standing beside you deciding what you get to look at.

Content last updated: July 2026.