What we check.
And what we refuse to guess.
Every report we issue states its scope, its sources, and its cut-off time to the hour. This page is the short version of what sits behind that page count — including the parts we deliberately do not do.
01 · What we check
- Legal existence and current registration status
- Shareholders, ultimate controller, beneficial owner
- Subscribed capital vs. capital actually paid in
- Directors, supervisors and legal representative
- Full history of registration changes
- Annual reports and declared financials
- 35 litigation, enforcement and regulatory factors
- Licences, qualifications, IP and branch footprint
02 · Why it matters
- You are about to wire money to a name on a contract
- Registered capital is a promise, not cash in a bank
- The person who signs may not be the person who owns
- A company that stopped filing usually stopped trading
- Court records show who has already been chased
- A licence you cannot verify is a licence you do not have
03 · What we don't check
- Overseas entities or offshore ownership layers
- Bank statements, credit bureau reports, loan records
- Undisclosed related parties and informal control
- On-site inspection or factory audit — quoted separately
- Product quality, capacity or regulatory conformity
- Anything the Chinese public record does not contain
04 · How fresh
- Registration and judicial records: retrieved on the report date, to the hour
- Annual reports: filed once a year, may lag up to 18 months
- Penalty and anomaly listings: updated on publication
- Anything we cannot verify is marked unconfirmed — never silently dropped
How we read a signal
A record on its own is not a finding. This is the translation layer we apply.
| What the record shows | What it usually means | What we do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Registered capital is large, paid-in is zero | Capital is a number, not money | We compute the funding gap and the subscription deadline |
| Zero social-insurance participants | Nobody actually works there | We treat it as the strongest single proxy for no real operations |
| Two or more consecutive missed annual reports | Dormant, or deliberately avoiding disclosure | We check anomaly listings and current registration status |
| Status reads "other", or the entity cannot be located | Record withdrawn, renamed, or never valid | We report it as unconfirmed and stop recommending the transaction |
| Several companies registered at one address | Desk company, agent registration or shell cluster | We map every co-located entity and their shared personnel |
| An exported certificate cannot be traced to its issuer | The document may be genuine but unverifiable | We say so plainly rather than assuming authenticity |
Four rules we hold to
About the Songxin Risk Score
The score runs from 0 to 100, where higher is worse. It is our own weighted model built from the factors above. It is not a credit rating, not a regulated credit reference, and not a prediction of default or insolvency. Every report prints the weights and the points awarded so that you can disagree with any single one of them and see what the total becomes. The model is described on request.
Disclaimer
This page describes our general methodology and is published for information only. A Songxin report is a commercial information report compiled from publicly available Chinese government and judicial records as of the date stated on its cover. It is not legal, tax, accounting or investment advice, and does not constitute a certification, audit or guarantee of any company's solvency, creditworthiness or regulatory compliance. No on-site inspection or management interview is conducted unless expressly stated in the Scope section. Information may be incomplete or subsequently amended at source.