[:en]B2B SaaS in China[:]

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China is a large and tempting market for software vendors. In April 2017, our Canadian based SaaS B2B company Nimonik acquired a similar company base in Shanghai, China. The company in Shanghai is called Envitool and was setup in 2010 by a Swedish company.

Envitool is a Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise (WOFE) and it offers an online service that helps businesses understand and monitor environmental, health and safety regulations. It also offers some consulting services that are critical to the use of the software system. When researching the market and legal requirements in the run-up to the acquisition, I read some interesting articles about selling software as a service in China and insightful articles on dos and dont’s on China Law Blog. Despite our research, there was not a lot of positive articles on B2B SaaS or SaaS in general in China.

Since the acquisition we have learned that running SaaS in China is not as hard as you might think, but it does require additional resources, costs and complexities. For one, you need to pick the appropriate legal arrangement for your entry into the Chinese market. The company was already a wholly owned foreign enterprise (WOFE), but we did look at various options below.

Legal Options for SaaS in China

  1. Do business through a Reseller:

Keep the server is located outside China to reduce risk that the Chinese government would put up a firewall and block access. At a minimum, the reseller locates customers for the foreign company’s SaaS product. The reseller provides the ultimate customer with a username and password that allows the customer to connect to the foreign server hosting the SaaS product. The reseller collects the fee from the customer and deducts and pays applicable Chinese business and income taxes and then remits the remaining amount to the foreign software provider.

  1. Set up a WOFE

We estimated it takes about 6 months of time and  $50K to $100K USD for paid up capital. Once paid up capital is resident in China, restrictions apply to taking out 50% of it, once the WFOE is profitable. Basically, you need to park money in the company in China and you can never take all of it out.

  1. Do business through an Agent

Licence the your software to a Chinese entity that obtains the commercial ICP license that allows for offering the SaaS service to Chinese customers through a Chinese server. If a partnership type arrangement is set up, the Chinese Agent would invoice and collect payment from customers, and continue to be responsible for the operations in China.

  1. Do business directly in China from Overseas:

You are short paid for the amount of taxes (withholding tax 10% & VAT). Payments may be delayed and clients may not receive permission to send payment as they cannot easily send money overseas. As a non-Chinese company, it would be difficult to get approval to run the software on a Chinese server, and if run on a non-Chinese server, you run the risk that the Chinese government would put up a firewall and block access.

Key Lessons Learned So Far

For a variety of reasons we opted to acquire the existing WOFE and continue to run the company from China. We are in the process of integrating the data from the Envitool software into our more modern platform, NimonikApp. Once that is complete, we will move all of our clients and data to the new platform and offer only that to the Chinese Market. We maintained the legal entity in China, maintained our ICP licence and ensured that we have trademarks in China.

To setup the Swedish Envitool company in 2010, the services of Scandic Sourcing were used. This is a Swedish consulting company that helps businesses setup in China. They also offer back-office services related to accounting, taxes, payroll and other items. We are still using their services and are very satisfied. They work with our team to ensure that all of our documents and paperwork are in order.

Getting Paid

Though all the legal questions are fun and interesting, the main worry for many foreign businesses is “will I get paid and how!” If there is one thing the Chinese Government is serious about, it is the collection of Taxes. Invoicing in China is interesting, the workflow is as follows:

  1. We speak to an existing or a new customer
  2. We send them an order form with a quote, this order form is stamped with our company seal (called a Chomp)
  3. They sign and return the order form (sometimes in paper format and sometimes in electronic format).
  4. We then send a real invoice (FaPiao), this is printed from a specific machine that is connected to the government servers, so they know exactly how much we charged, when and to whom
  5. We stamp the invoice with another company seal (you have three different ones, one of which authorizes the sale of the business)
  6. We then physically send this invoice to our client
  7. Our client pays us via bank transfer
  8. We charge a 6% VAT on all of our invoices and we have to remit that amount immediately, not when we get paid.
  9. If an invoice never gets paid, it can be cancelled, but it is complicated. This happens in less than 2% of our cases.

I could go on with the intricacies of managing a team of Chinese sales and EHS experts, the cost pressure from local Chinese competitors and the demands for constantly increasing salaries – but I will spare those details for now. Long story short is that you can do B2B SaaS in China, but be prepared to invest at least 500 000$ before you see profit and make sure you work with local partners who really understand the system. Feel free to contact me with questions or comments, always happy to help a fellow weiguoren!

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Published on January 30, 2018