China Payment Terms: Tricks Of The Trade
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
How Do I Decide Which Type of Foreign Entity to Use When Taking My Company Overseas?
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
Splitting Salaries of Non-Chinese Employees: The Legal and Tax Issues
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
China Distribution Contracts: The Basics
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
Do You Know What Your Chinese Language Contract Says?
If you don’t know this yet after reading our blog, you should tattoo on your forearm that “there is no such thing as boilerplate in a China contract.” That’s really true for any contract. I don’t care how long or short, important or casual. The boilerplate (or standard terms and conditions) section of a contract
Giving Your IP to China Out of Love
One of our China IP lawyers tends towards sarcasm, and in cleaning out my email stack I found this email: Another company that loves China so much that they have already given all their IP to a Chinese company with nothing in return. American and European companies seem not to realize that if they teach
Avoiding China Company Formation Problems
Every so often, someone about to have their Chinese company shut down by the Chinese government contacts us. These sorts of contacts accelerate during economic slowdowns and times of tension and that has been the case of late as well. The following is a composite of some of the emails we have received relating to
China Employee Non-Competes: Do Not Try This at Home
Many American companies (at least outside California where employee non-competes are generally considered invalid) love non- competes and they use them as a matter of course with most (sometimes all) their employees. Generally, a non-compete agreement or a non-compete provision in an employee contract provides that the employee cannot work for one of the employer’s
Key China Employment Documents
I recently read an email to one of my firm’s clients from one of our China employment lawyers. The email explained a large set of employment documents prepared initially just for the in-country China WFOE manager, but written to be used with various imminent China employee hires as well. Because this email so nicely sets