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I currently live in South Africa, but I am an Australian citizen. I am planning to relocate to the UK for 2 years and then Ireland indefinitely. I am building an online business to market a product that I create that I expect to be sold to customers world wide. However I am struggling with where the business should be registered. The business will hopefully be my source of income whilst in the UK, but not sure if i should register it there or Ireland where I will definitely be moving. What are the things to consider? and if I move at a later date - how easy is it for the business to move across borders with me?

Thanks

Des

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3 Answers

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Some things you should be considering:

  1. Where will your customers be, and what are the implications for them of any given location (sales tax, for instance, and their perception of your business)?

  2. Do you anticipate working with other people as employees, partners and associates? If so, where do you expect them to be located?

  3. Where are you happiest to deal with your accountant, bank and so on?

  4. Assuming you are successful in your venture before you move to Ireland, would you rather sell it as a going concern or continue with the business after that (second) relocation?

  5. Can you obtain any assistance (financial or otherwise) locating in any particular country or region?

You should certainly consider the UK and Ireland. Then depending on the nature of your goods and services you may want to look at the Channel Islands (for instance, Jersey sits outside the EU but is treated as part of the European Community for the purposes of free trade in goods, and has established itself in a number of online-related businesses).

It's probably worth making contact with UKTI and Enterprise Ireland to get an idea of what might be available to you by way of assistance. And you should definitely seek specialist advice regarding tax.

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Since Ireland is the most tax friendly of the jurisdictions you mentioned, and since you plan on eventually ending up there i would put a heavy emphasis on trying to setup shop there. – Frank Dec 30 '10 at 1:37
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Register in Ireland. Easiest. UK / Ireland are not that far away for the regular going there trip. Plus it saves you all the hassles later. Moving the business legally is the smaller part - moving accounts etc. is harder.

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Doing Business is a website developed by the World Bank to make it easy to determine how easy it is to do business in different parts of the world. All countries are ranked, and it's easy to re-order the list by several different methods.

According to the site, Ireland is the 11th easiest country to start a business in, but 9th easiest to do business overall. The UK however is the 17th easiest to start a business, but 4th easiest to do business overall.

I'm an Australian moving to Denmark (with a UK passport) to start a business, and this site has been really informative to me.

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