Legal Records Check

You should perform this check as soon as you have sourced the supplier and are assessing whether they’re a suitable manufacturing partner. For maximum peace of mind, perform it before placing orders, wiring payments, or giving the supplier access to any of your intellectual property.

Here are a couple of examples about Chinese companies (note that we also perform this service in other countries, but not all the same information can be gathered).

In this case, the company is clearly a trading company, not a manufacturer.

And, in this case, the company might display unscrupulous behavior (they were sentenced for improper management of dangerous materials, they have registered some intellectual property that may belong to their customers). If they don’t have good explanations, it is better to avoid them.

This is reported back to you in a detailed PDF document which gives you advance warning about any issues which may affect your decision to work with them.

We just need the company name and address in Chinese (or the local language of your supplier) and a little context about your needs, such as your product type, important requirements, intended order quantity, and so on.

We can check suppliers’ companies in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and other SE Asian countries, too.
Each country has different types of documentation up to a point, however, the overall information we provide for your assurance remains basically the same.

• China, India: much information can be gathered from government sources, directly or indirectly.
• Hong Kong, Vietnam: same, but obtaining some of the information necessitates making payments to government departments, so a surcharge of 50 USD per company will apply.
• Thailand, Indonesia: possible, too, but longer lead time.

Even if you’ve validated a supplier, due diligence needs to be performed on a product (or component) that is already developed (or is being developed) to assure that they won’t lead to costly safety issues or recalls later on.

We advise also doing a certificate & report verification where we will take your supplier’s certificates and testing reports (for example, certificates that products conform to various safety standards required by your countries like a CE certificate or NIOSH certification) and check their legitimacy with the issuing bodies. This gives you extra assurance that their products will be high-quality, safe, and ready for export.

If the supplier’s paperwork is in order, the next step is to audit their factory. By doing so, our technicians check the factory’s processes and infrastructure on-site and assure that they are a capable production partner.

Services

• Combined Supplier Due Diligence Checks
• New Factory Identification
• Factory Audits
• Certificates and Reports Verification
• Supplier Bank Account Verification

Blog posts

• How To Find Suppliers In China [Importer Tips]
• 6 tips for background checks on Chinese suppliers
• Chinese Supplier Verification Tips, Based on the Business License
• China Supplier Vetting Part 9: In-Depth Due Diligence