The registered address of China suppliers changes several times a year. Is it normal?

Changing registered addresses three times a year is really abnormal. Normal company expansion and change addresses generally change from small places to large places, from outer suburbs to suburbs, and it is gradual. There are three cross-regional changes within a year, and each change requires an industrial and commercial process. There are usually reasons behind this frequent operation that are worth digging deep into.

As far as I know, frequent changes in registered addresses are usually due to these reasons. The first is to avoid debt or execution. When a company is being pursued by creditors and the court wants to seize its assets, some companies will change their registered address to create the illusion that "people are gone and the building is empty", or move their registered place to a cross-regional jurisdiction to increase the creditor's recourse costs. The second is to enjoy tax incentives or subsidies. Different districts have different investment promotion policies. Some companies frequently change their registration places in order to obtain settlement rewards or tax refunds between different districts. This operation itself is not very compliant. The third thing is that shell companies deliberately create address change records to make the company appear "active." In fact, every address change is just an affiliation and there is no actual operation at all.

To determine which situation you can do several cross-checks. Look at the address type before and after the change. If the registered address is a virtual address or the address of a business secretary every time (it is the kind of small offices with hundreds of companies hanging in a building), it means that the company may never have a fixed business place.

Let's see if the factory address it claims is consistent with the registered address. Many trading companies pretend to be factories, with virtual registered addresses, and the factory addresses are rented separately or do not exist at all. You can ask the supplier to provide the factory address and search it on a map. You can also use another data to make an auxiliary judgment, which is the number of people under social insurance. If a company moves three times in a year but the number of people insured remains zero, there is a high probability that it is not a factory in normal operation.

It is very troublesome to move a normal factory once. It makes no sense to move three times in a row without losing employees.

When selecting a partner supplier, I will pay attention to the number of changes to the supplier's registered address. If it changes more than twice in a short period of time, we will list it as a risk item that needs to be concerned about. In your case, I suggest asking the other party directly for the specific reasons for each change and the corresponding lease contract. If the other party cannot explain clearly or produce the lease contract, the reliability of the supplier is worth re-evaluating.