The China Experts: Baptiste Basset, Managing Director of Shearwater Group
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
In this episode of The China Experts, Kristina Koehler-Coluccia is joined by Baptiste Basset, Managing Director of Shearwater Group. The point of this series is to introduce foreign investors to people who have already made the mistakes, and Baptiste walks through his own route into the Chinese market, what went wrong along the way and what he would tell a company starting out today.
Who is Baptiste Basset?
Baptiste Basset is Managing Director of Shearwater Group. He is one of the entrepreneurs and business leaders featured in The China Experts, a series built on first-hand accounts of what operating in China actually demands rather than on the version that appears in market-entry brochures.
What this episode covers
How Baptiste came to work in the Chinese market
The challenges he ran into on the ground and how he worked through them
What running an operation in China teaches you that desk research cannot
Where assumptions formed outside China tend to break down
The advice he would give a company at the very start of its China journey
Why your business scope decides what you can actually sell
One of the recurring themes in this series is that problems in China are rarely the ones a foreign board expects. A good example is business scope. Every Chinese company carries a defined business scope on its licence, and it is not decorative wording. It governs which activities you may invoice for, which VAT fapiao you can issue, and in practice whether a Chinese customer's finance department will accept your contract at all. Founders often accept whatever scope a local agent proposes, then find a year later that the consulting revenue they want to bill or the trading activity they want to add falls outside it and needs an amendment, a fresh approval and sometimes a change of premises or capital.
The same logic applies to the entity itself. Choosing between a WFOE, a representative office, a joint venture or a Hong Kong company that contracts into the mainland changes your tax position, your ability to move profit out, and how fast you can put people on a local payroll. Making that decision before you sign a lease or a customer contract costs a fraction of unwinding it afterwards.
Watch the full interview
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