Whenever one of our China lawyers drafts an agreement for a client doing business in China, one of the first things we ask is the identity of the Chinese counterparty. It’s a deceptively simple question. The typical Chinese manufacturer (for example) is composed of multiple entities, with complicated lines of ownership. One entity may run
Whenever one of our China attorneys is retained to represent a client providing goods or services to China, we start by asking about the terms of payment. If the Chinese side is going to pay our client the full amount upfront, the contract provisions do not need to be too specific. But this almost never
A post we did on China NNN Agreements many years ago received the following comment, which comment was sent to me by a reader this weekend along with a bunch of similar and additional followup questions: Your posts on NNN are beyond a shadow of a doubt “the most fascinating and informative” articles on nondisclosure
In two recent posts, How To Succeed When Taking Your Company Overseas and Do I Always Need to Form a Company in a Foreign Country?, I discussed some common issues companies need to wrestle with when deciding whether and how to take their company overseas. Among those are the pitfalls of having a foreign entity
If you want recourse against your Chinese counter-party, you must have a contract with them.
I saw this headline and I could not resist reading the article by the Moneyist on MarketWatch: “I bought a store for $80K. It quadrupled in value. My friend gave $7K for the purchase and $6.7K for repairs. Does he get back 4 times both investments?” I could not resist because it is so similar
Our China lawyers are often asked whether it is legal to pay non-Chinese employees from both their China WFOE and from a company outside China (usually their home country parent company). The answer is an easy yes, but the tax issues that arise from doing so are where things get really difficult and why we
Way back in 2006, we wrote a post titled, How NOT to Handle Your China Legal Matters. A friend-client emailed me today saying that he printed it out in 2006 and still gives it to his employees before they have any involvement with China. In his email, he asked whether it needed any updating and
Our China lawyers have been seeing an increase in work for foreign companies entering into distribution contracts with Chinese distributors, due mostly to China’s rapid growth as a consumer market and to the difficulties and risks foreign companies are seeing when they go into China directly these days. Many of the companies that come to
With China’s manufacturing economy continuing to slow, the international litigators at my law firm are getting an increasing number of calls and emails from companies (mostly American and European) who have not been paid for products or services they provided to Chinese companies or failed to get what they paid for to Chinese companies. In
