As I’ve a soft spot for Yunnan province, I thought I’d pass along this email from a friend of a friend in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, who sets up foreign companies in the mountaintop city. Lee Perkins of the China Intel Group wrote:

We’ve been doing quite a lot of business recently setting up WOFE’s for people who hope to do business in Kunming. It’s becoming quite a trend at the moment. Mainly, at the moment, most people have some small scale business or freelance interests and have just decided that Kunming is a nice environment to pursue those interests. Making for quite an interesting scene.

We were working with on computer programmer who set up an online hotel booking service, a US translator who moved down from Beijing to develop his business and a guy who just had already made some money and wanted to relax for a while running his own restaurant.

People are often surprised by how easy it is to get a foreign owned business up and running here – and given the environment I can see that might well be a growth area for small foreign businesses in the future.