The Free Trade Port's headline incentives — a reduced corporate income tax rate for enterprises in encouraged industries, a capped individual income tax rate for qualifying talent, and duty exemptions under the zero-tariff lists — are what make Hainan a different proposition from Shanghai or Shenzhen. None of them are automatic. Each turns on eligibility conditions the entity has to meet at the outset and keep meeting afterwards.
Substantive operation is the condition underneath most of them: a Hainan-registered entity is expected to genuinely operate here, across its management, its people, its accounts, and its assets — not to hold an address. We assess eligibility before a structure is fixed, then keep the conditions demonstrable rather than leaving them to be reconstructed when someone asks.
Services in this practice area
Encouraged Industry Eligibility
Assessment of whether an entity's actual activity falls inside Hainan's encouraged-industry catalogue — the gateway condition for the Free Trade Port's reduced corporate income tax rate.
- Availability is not automatic
- Scope drafted to the catalogue
- The revenue-composition condition
- A written position, or a plain no
Substantive Operation Compliance
Establishing and maintaining the substantive operation a Hainan entity has to demonstrate to hold a preferential position — across management, people, accounts, and assets.
- Assessed across every dimension at once
- Having substance vs evidencing it
- Contemporaneous beats reconstructed
- Maintained, not periodically rebuilt
Preferential Tax Position Support
Applicability review and filing support for the Free Trade Port's preferential corporate and individual income tax positions, and for the talent recognition the individual cap depends on.
- Two positions, both conditional
- Not a one-time test
- Talent recognition sequenced with the visa
- Scoped by us, filed through the licensed firm
Zero-Tariff and Customs Readiness
Applicability assessment and compliance preparation for the Free Trade Port's zero-tariff regimes and its closed-border customs operation.
- Catalogues, not a blanket rule
- End-use obligations persist after clearance
- The processing value-added route
- Closed-border readiness
Park and Site Selection
Comparison of Hainan's principal parks and development zones against a specific business, covering the policy, sector, and practical differences between them.
- The zones differ, materially
- Sector orientation is the first filter
- Address decisions interact with substance
- The rationale recorded
Eligibility assessed before the structure is fixed, not after
The expensive version of this work is remedial: an entity registered with a business scope that turns out to sit outside the encouraged catalogue, or a structure whose management and accounting genuinely sit elsewhere, discovering at assessment time that the position it has been filing on does not hold. Reversing either means changing the entity, not the filing.
We put the eligibility question first — before the scope is drafted, before the site is chosen, before the first filing takes a position. Where the answer is that the business does not qualify, that is worth knowing at the point it is still cheap to act on, and we say so plainly rather than filing optimistically and leaving the exposure with you.
Why choose HainanInc?
One accountable team
A single point of contact carries your engagement from first filing through to ongoing compliance — not a rotating cast of specialists.
Documented calendars
Every recurring obligation is tracked to a date, not a quarter, so nothing lapses unnoticed.
Built for administrative reality
Filing sequences and document chains are built around how Hainan's processes actually run, not the published version of them.
Fixed-scope engagements
You know what is included, and what it costs, before work starts — not after an invoice arrives.
Direct access to the people doing the work
Questions go to the team handling your filing, not to an account manager relaying them onward.
Substance-first structuring
Advice accounts for what regulators actually look for when reviewing qualification, not only what qualifies on paper.
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A single engagement rarely stays confined to one practice area. Explore the rest of what we cover in the Hainan Free Trade Port.