The first entity in India

What was actually wrong

Nothing, yet. That is what makes this one worth publishing: the damage in international expansion is done by an optimistic timeline agreed in a boardroom, not by a failure on the ground.

Signing off an overseas set-up on paper — new subsidiary, new bank account, tick the box — is a familiar exercise, and the assumption is that India is the same with more forms. It is a different order of complexity, and one wrong move means starting a step again.

What was done

Tax. India’s Goods and Services Tax is not VAT with a different name. It is a multi-layered structure — central, state and integrated GST depending on whether a transaction crosses state lines — with registration, filing and reconciliation obligations that make a UK VAT return look like a formality. Getting it wrong is not an administrative slip: it creates friction in the supply chain and with customers when returns have to be corrected.

Banking. The bank was one the group already used in three other jurisdictions, which turned out to mean very little. India has specific rules on paid-up share capital and how an entity is capitalised, and the order of events matters — the account is not genuinely operational until capital has arrived the right way, with the right documentation. That stage held up everything else. Moving money afterwards, particularly cross-border, required documentation, evidencing and local sign-off on almost every transfer.

Governance. Indian company law has specific and actively enforced requirements on annual general meetings and board meetings — timing, quorum, documentation — and they are genuinely different from what a UK reference point would lead you to expect.

What changed

The entity was established, and the timetable was the lesson. Local expertise here is not a nice-to-have; it is the thing that makes the process possible at all. Running it from a distance, against a UK-shaped plan, would have taken far longer and carried real risk of getting something wrong.

One more thing worth knowing before you commit: unwinding an Indian entity is a multi-year undertaking in its own right. The exit is a bigger commitment than the entry, and almost nobody prices it at the point the decision is made.