Newsletter
COMMERCIAL REGISTRATION LAW AMENDED
The Commercial Registration Law has just been amended to abolish business registration cer-tificates and unified certificate issuance for profit-seeking enterprises, and reduce the proc-essing time for business registration to seven days in all cases.
Before the amendment, the law provided that commercial enterprises and their branch offices (except for small-scale businesses not required to register) may not operate without prior approval and registration by the competent authority and the issuance of a registration certificate. In the amended law, the words "and the issuance of a business registration certificate" were deleted, in line with the abolition of the requirement for business licenses in the recent amendment to the Company Law. Further, when agencies process applications for business registration, they will notify other relevant agencies so that these can perform their regulatory functions, and a com-prehensive database will be set up, to establish a simplified registration system
In other words, businesses will now be allowed to register as long as they comply with the statutory requirements for registration. Other matters, such as compliance with urban planning, fire safety, sanitation and other requirements will no longer be examined as part of the business registration process.