Digital Crew ran three webinars throughout May and June, along with Horizons Corporate Advisory, a firm providing legal and tax solutions to enterprises across world regions and legal systems.

The first webinar, Launch Your Business in China, went live on 20th May 2020 with Daniel Xu (APAC General Manager, Digital Crew) and Lucia Netti (Regional Partner, Horizons Advisory) as the speakers. 

Lucia Netti is Horizons regional partner overseeing the firm’s Sino-European activities. On the other hand, Daniel Xu is the APAC General Manager at Digital Crew who is responsible for driving strategic direction and leading the team to deliver services to clients. 

Digital Crew conducted a webinar on the same topic with Horizons Advisory on 3rd June 2020 for the American audience. Along with Horizon’s Lucia Netti, Digital Crew had their US General Manager, Anita Lee as the second panellist. Anita handles clients in the company’s U.S. office and her global business experience has given her an additional edge over connecting businesses all over the world. 

The Launch Your Business in China webinar threw light on why to consider China at this hour, by discussing about the New Foreign Investment Law (FIL), which was effective from 1 January 2020, and the digital trends in China. 

Here are some of the key takeaways from the webinar:

• Foreign Investment Law (FIL), which was effective from 1 January 2020, paves way to significant changes for business environment including easing of business processes and strengthening State Council and local policies that support foreign investment in China
• A foreign investor can freely transfer inward or outward its contributions, profits, capital gains, income from asset disposal, royalties of intellectual property rights, lawfully obtained compensation or indemnity, income from liquidation and so forth within the territory of China, in Chinese Yuan or a foreign currency 
• Simplification of some procedures to enter the China market such as acceleration and completion of online, paperless filing 
• The 2019 Negative List has removed restrictions in certain sectors. (Prohibited sectors are largely related to the manufacture of Chinese medicine, nuclear plants, transportation and so forth.)

Trademarks

• China follows Principle of Territoriality. Which means, if your trademark is already registered and so protected in one country, your trademark right will not be automatically protected in China
• In China, there is the “first-to-file” system for trademarks registration. That means the trademark right generally belongs to the first person who files the application of registration in the China Trademark Office

Digital trends

• China’s e-commerce sector has held firm throughout the pandemic 
• Businesses report more than 70% of its new customers came from lower-tier cities in the fiscal year 2019
• 63.2% of users watched live-streaming to relax
• 86% of live streaming users thought positively about live streaming marketing 
• Kuaishou, the No. 2 biggest short video app, is taking live-streaming to another level, recording 100 million live-streaming DAUs by December 2019
• There are 1.2 billion Monthly Active Users on WeChat and 82 minutes per day are spent on the app 

• Chinese promote their own internal apps and websites over international ones as they follow the Chinese internal policies. Therefore, to pass the Great Firewall of China, make use of Chinese apps and international ones
• Connect better with Chinese audience by having a presence online with content in Simplified Chinese 
• Internet Content Provider (ICP) licenses must be issued for all websites that are hosted on servers located in Mainland China

WANT MORE INSIGHTS FROM THE LAUNCH YOUR BUSINESS IN CHINA WEBINAR?

Watch the webinar below and download its presentation deck here.