Some Hong Kong companies change their name every couple of months | Hacker News Reader

Some Hong Kong companies change their name every couple of months

blog.dataguru.hk

154 pointsslygent59 comments

It's a trick beginning musicians use. It allows them to be hired after they did a awful live performance that got them blacklisted. IIRC, Ian Anderson, from Jethro Tull, half-jokingly said on an interview this is how the band got its name - this was the name they had when they were stopped being blacklisted.

While skimming the record of the questioned company, I noticed that several names listed there are actually the ones of other (existing) companies. For example, "中電光谷聯合控股有限公司" ("China Electronics Optics Valley Union Holding Company Limited") is a public company listed on HKEx.

So, my guess is that something is wrong with the data scraping?

----

Note: Some googling reveals that the company ("PREMIER DRAGON DEVELOPMENT LIMITED") is a manufacturer / exporter of women's underwear, with 1-5 employees.

Author here. The scraping is correct :) But you found something that's common on the registry: companies with very similar names, or even identical names at different times, even if they're completely unrelated (which they might or might not be here). However, I think you might have found an interesting connection...

There are three companies in the situation you describe:

* Good old Premier Dragon (0650420), which decided between 2016-09-08 and 2016-10-20 to be called China Electronics Optics Valley Union Holding Company Limited 中電光谷聯合控股有限公司. (You can check the original record from my site https://dataguru.hk/hkcompany?crno=0650420 by clicking on the company number near the top of the page, which activates some Javascript to trick Hong Kong's Companies Registry to show you the record, hence why I can't post a direct link to it here or on dataguru.hk).

* A slightly older company, 0581220, changed to CHINA ELECTRONICS OPTICS VALLEY UNION COMPANY LIMITED 中電光谷聯合有限公司 on its 20th anniversary in 2016-12-13. Notice the slightly different name, actually.

* A Cayman Islands-registered company, China Electronics Optics Valley Union Holding Company Limited 中電光谷聯合控股有限公司, which only got that name on 2016-09-30, during 0650420's tenure with this name. This company is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under symbol 0798. Its major shareholdings are public, and also available on my website, in this case here: https://dataguru.hk/hkexdisclosures_corporation?corporation=....

One reason I think you've found an interesting connection and that these companies are related is that you can see from the last link is that a major shareholder of the listed company is AAA Finance and Investment Holdings Limited, a BVI company... but company 0581220, a Hong Kong company, was called AAA FINANCE & INVESTMENT LIMITED 三A銀信投資有限公司 before it switched to China Electronics etc.

Wow. Thank you. I will include this as an addendum to my blog post!

"Unavailability of Electronic Search Services (e-Search Services) under the Integrated Companies Registry Information System (ICRIS)

Due to technical problems, electronic search services under ICRIS has been temporarily suspended. Urgent action is being taken to investigate and recover the system. We apologize for any inconvenience caused"

Looks like they took the system down after seeing this. Also, they're using lang=zh instead of lang=zh-hk or zh-hant... that font though :(

As for the premier dragon company, isn't it typical for Chinese companies to have names unrelated to their business, but which sounds good to stick investees who wants to invest in IT?

Sounds like I should rename my current startup, frobx.ai to “Enormously Profitable in Multiple Lines of Business”

Well there was the famous example of Long Island Ice Tea's stock soaring when they renamed to Long Blockchain.

Ha, I was making a joke but that is an excellent real world example!

Well, frobx doesn't exactly roll off the tongue ;)

On that topic Nokia was a pulp mill and rubber company...

And still are. Its one of the oldest Finnish companies and their technological branch is still just a very young part of a longer history.

Curious as to how OP managed to get the registry data. HK government is infamous for sucking at opening their data. This guy: https://webb-site.com/ is famous for spitting in their eyes regularly to remind them.

There is online registry where you can look these things up. The site sucks but works.

I've never heard of "Spitting in their eyes" - such a harsh, disgusting phrase.

HK is an offshore banking heaven. Running from taxmen is easier if they can't bust your scheme by pressing CTRL+F.

While something shady is possible, it also may be the case that these are "shelf companies", and rotating through names helps advertise/test names that could be attractive to shelf-company buyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_corporation

No that's not what shelf companies are attractive for. It's all about age and quick access to an incorporated entity, the name barely matters and can easily be changed on request. Advertising or testing names by using a public company register makes no sense, it's like apple testing the name of their new phone through some public register of a telecom license filing.

I can believe you, but every online offer of shelf companies I've seen has prominently listed an inventory of actual, available-today companies by name, making me think some buyers don't want to go through the name change. And, one site I just browsed lists as one of the "main reasons" for using a shelf company is "to assist with the sometimes onerous task of designing a new company name".

Which actually suggests another theory for the HK name changes: maybe they're a fast/cheap way to instantly reserve a corporate name of interest, which is then later released to whoever really wants it.

None of what you said explains why you would want to change names every couple months.

That would tell you changing names is trivial, commonplace, cheap, frequent. In other words, you can advertise virtually any generic name you do not own yet, and change it as you please the moment a customer wants to buy a particular name.

Unless the names are unique, rare and squatted like high value domain names. In this case you want to own the name first before you advertise it. But that doesn't logically correspond to ditching the name every 2 months.

Perhaps it is the reason, I can't say for sure, but I'd say it's very unlikely. (My company deals with lots of shelves, or at least used to before incorporation was simplified with new legislation some 10 years ago)

Avoiding prying eyes from journalists, creditors or regulators from a dubious venture seems much more likely, though it's a very crude and attention drawing method I certainly wouldn't recommend.

If you advertised a name that was both desirable to the customer and legally available – but you did not yet reserve it, you'd have the risk of the customer or competitors grabbing the name first.

Perhaps changing the name is trivial – for an expert in the jurisdiction's procedures. But a little bothersome for typical out-of-jurisdiction customers.

You might thus try a new name so you could advertise it safely, and give customers the one-stop, one-step shipping experience they want.

Further, as companies are sold, you might churn names. For example, if a customer bites on a certain name, if they don't want it on exactly the legal-form/age company where it is currently parked, you might transfer it to another company that matches their other needs. If you realize that the style of name they chose is rising in popularity, you might generate a new name of that kind, but then place it on an older company with a name that's been long-passed over.

I would expect a deeper analysis of whether any of the short-lived names then moved to other entities (where they perhaps were used for longer periods) to be able to confirm or disprove this speculation.

This sounds like the common practice of squatting on a domain name. People who are good at it don't squat on the same set of names forever; they adjust their portfolios based on what's trendy at the time and let unprofitable names expire. People who peddle shelf corporations might do the same, except they can easily rename their wares.

And of course, just like domain names, you can't register more than one corporation with the same name in the same jurisdiction.

Whoever owns this company has probably gone through several phases during which they thought there might be heavy demand for names related to Chinese resources, e-healthcare, education, land, and capital management. They also seem to have a procedure in place that reverts an unsold shelf corporation to a placeholder name or internal identifier (Premier Dragon) after a while.

my first UK company was a 'shelf' company. It was already pre-registered with a name ( which I never changed ) and all I had to was sign a document and pay a small fee to take it over. At the time it was WAY faster than starting one from scratch.

These days it's just as fast to create a company from scratch as it's all online. My second and third companies were 'from scratch'.

The situation in Denmark is the same. Back when pre-registered companies were more common, the Stakemann law firm in Copenhagen had a big share of this market, and Peter Andreas Stakemann is the founder of a large number of Danish companies. This company registry page lists him as connected to 2,000 companies, mostly as founder or initial director. I suspect the system is limiting the displayed list to 2,000 and he is actually connected to tens of thousands of companies.

https://datacvr.virk.dk/data/visenhed?enhedstype=person&id=4...

If they were shelf companies, they would be laying cold, and not conducting commercial operations

Which seems to be the case here, he did say those companies were dormant.

Simplest explanation is that they are involved in some kind of fraud.

Given that Chinese companies and their financial data are notoriously difficult to obtain, it is no surprise either.

A simpler reason would be that it is cheaper to change control and name of a company than it is to set one up.

Then you have a market to rent the business.

Which sounds like a great avenue for fraud.

I recently read Billion Dollar Whale (https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Whale-Fooled-Hollywood...) which I enjoyed. It seemed to me to be surprisingly easy to launder money through shell companies like the ones listed here. I would speculate also that a company with many name changes would involved in some weird stuff.

Or a great avenue for just skipping the bullshit when a supplier requires 5 years of some administrative nuance that a new company would never have

So... fraud?

skipping a supplier's arbitrary private company policy has nothing to do with intent to commit fraud.

your work ethic is at your discretion and try to optimize your time.

I don't know where you are learning your ethics, but misrepresenting yourself to a potential client is pretty standard, boilerplate fraud. Not criminal (usually), but it is a civil breach of contract.

Sort of like a reverse merger?

These are companies registered in Hong Kong though, where data like this is easily available, as evinced by the website in question.

I'm the author of this article.

Unfortunately financial and officer/director data for Hong Kong private companies is hidden behind a paywall (see details here under the section Tear Down That Wall: https://webb-site.com/articles/identity2.asp), although at least it is available, as far as it goes, but even then, the Ultimate Beneficial Owner is not public. [This is the situation currently being litigated against Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who it is claimed still controlled a Hong Kong company Skycom (https://dataguru.hk/hkcompany?crno=0644842) behind the scenes].

I'm the author of this article.

Can you address the question of why this phenomenon exists ?

Which phenomenon? Being the author of an article? ;)

If you mean "why are names of companies being changed every couple of months?", I really have no idea, especially given that some of these companies seem to be linked, so it's not like different groups of people are doing it. Perhaps.

If you mean "why is the Hong Kong government making its Companies Registry less transparent over time?", there are some landmines involving China and tycoons that I'm not going to risk stepping on here, at least right now.

I meant the phenom of frequent name changes observed among some Hong Kong companies

No he meant “being the author of an article".

This is being downvoted, but plausible. Many on HN have commented on the phenomenon of how the author of the article always manages to chime in, much more frequently than somewhere like Reddit despite the relatively tiny userbase of HN. Maybe it's more welcoming here?

Not sure if I'm defending someone who is joking or not, but I would be interested to know how people come across their own articles on here (along with the more obvious question re: these Hong Kong companies).

> ...but I would be interested to know how people come across their own articles on here...

You might see a spike in traffic with a HN referrer or a friend my tell you “hey, saw your article on HN”

I have had friends comment privately on my comments on HN.

Do the names have to mean approximately the same thing or sounds the same in English and Chinese? You can imagine someone sneakily using one or the other language to obfuscate.

The company names rules don't say anything about the names having to match up in any way: https://www.cr.gov.hk/en/companies_ordinance/docs/Guide_RegC...

Street names in Hong Kong don't have to match up either, e.g. 青山道 vs Castle Peak Road. (Maybe there's an obscure or obscure-to-me source that makes this one make sense, though.)

I suspect it's something to do with Hong Kong's colonial history… Chinese names chosen by Chinese-speaking locals and English names chosen by English-speaking colonial administrators…?

I recently opened a Hong Kong company. During the process I’ve seen how easy it can be to change your company name, but there is a company registry number tied to it.

I don’t know if that changes too though.

Probably tax trickery.

I've been told that some franchises of grocery and alcohol stores in Poland rotate through names every couple years, in order to avoid paying some taxes that kick in after a number of years of operation. I didn't verify that info, though.

The name has nothing to do here, because companies are identified by NIP (tax id), so the name doesn't matter.

Probably what you meant is that new company is created and it takes over business from the previous.

It could be one of those "off the shelf" companies. Rather than incorporating one's own company one can buy an already existing company and change the name. Given how easy it is to incorporate in Hong Kong I wouldn't recommend that.

Also, those name changes are done through Companies Registry and part of public record. I wouldn't necessarily brush it up as shady.

It’s just like ad networks and ad agencies that rename after being blacklisted or caught of malpractice

Echos of Vernor Vinge's 2007 novel "Rainbows End" where one character has a system where his companies spawn other companies every few seconds.

Are you sure you're not thinking of Charles Stross' "Accelerando" (where this is done in Ch. 2. "Troubadour" [1])? It's been a while since I read "Rainbows End" [2], but I don't recall autonomous companies in it, and I don't see an obvious way that they would fit in the plot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

I think you are right. I'll have to give "Accelerando" another read.

The original title Some Hong Kong companies change their name every couple of months is more appropriate as the artice does not go into why.

Ok we've taken out the why bit.

The first line of this article links to a source that appears to show this... is it wrong? It looks like it may fully source their claims.

Was the title on the news site edited?

I still don't know as the article doesn't address why...

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