How To Choose Where To Locate Your Company
I promised to write some thoughts on how to select a location for your company. This is not a scientific or detailed analysis but my personal framework; how I try to conduct this process and also how I have done it in practice.
First, it is not about one location but many. You need to consider your company's structure. You can have the holding company, head office, R&D unit, sales offices, etc in different places. For each of these you can take into account several different factors, e.g., taxes, costs, salary levels, local support, customers, funding, needed resources etc. But as an entrepreneur you can also factor in your personal preferences and how the location will affect your quality of life.
I cannot analyze all the factors relevant to all the different types of companies here; I will just give a few examples. Each individual or the founders together can have a holding company that owns an operative company. Taxation is one important matter to consider for the location of the holding company. Some offshore locations have very low taxes but they can easily raise some negative issues, such as credibility. However, there are also European locations (e.g. the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Estonia, Cyprus) that have quite friendly tax systems as well as Singapore and Hong Kong in Asia.
