South Korea company registration for foreigners

Registering a company in South Korea follows the authorities' sequence. This order matters when starting a business in South Korea as a foreign investor. The business structure comes first, with the name checked through the Supreme Court Internet Registry Office and trademark conflicts searched at the Korean Intellectual Property Office. The capital decision follows, because it settles whether the company takes the foreign-investment route. On that route the FDI notification goes to a designated foreign-exchange bank or KOTRA, the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, and the capital reaches a temporary paid-in capital account, both before the Commercial Registry filing. Tax registration, the corporate bank account and foreign-invested-enterprise registration close the sequence.

Registration at the Commercial Registry is the midpoint rather than the finish. The steps to open a corporate bank account and complete foreign-invested-enterprise registration are still ahead, and only the second confirms the investment's FDI status. From then on the obligations are the company's own: once it hires, staff are enrolled in the four social insurance schemes, the National Pension Service, National Health Insurance, Employment Insurance and Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance, and annual financial statements are prepared under K-GAAP or K-IFRS. The one thing to check before any of that is whether the planned activity is regulated, because a sector licence has to be in place before trading starts and is best mapped early.