Dezan Shira & Associates Review

Dezan Shira & Associates is a professional services firm founded in Hong Kong in 1992. Over the last three decades, the company has focused on serving its clients in negotiating Asia’s complex business environments. Its pan-Asia network spreads across 27 wholly-owned offices in Asia, including locations in China, India, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. 

Its services are marketed to a broad range of businesses, including fast-growing startups and established multinational corporations. Despite its presence in over 15 Asian countries, it also boasts a global presence, with some of its 600-strong workforce based in Europe and the Americas.

Some of the services it offers to its clients include business advisory, tax consulting, corporate establishment, and risk compliance. In this review, we’ll discuss more about who Dezan Shira is, the services they provide, and the pros and cons of working with this pan-Asia multidisciplinary professional services operation.

To check out the services of some other Asia expansion partners, see our reviews of Acclime, Vistra, FDI China and Roedl. 

Dezan Shira’s Key Services

Dezan Shira markets itself as a pan-Asia professional services firm. International business owners and investors are well-supported with an array of packages, ranging from incorporation services to compliance advisories. So, what are the core services available through Dezan Shira?

1. Corporate Establishment and Governance

Setting up and governing corporate entities is crucial for international businesses seeking to establish themselves in new markets and comply with local regulations. Primarily, Dezan Shira offers these services in the Middle East and across Asia, which are notorious for their regulation-heavy business ecosystems.

Dezan Shira provides complete support for company formation and structuring, including managing entity registration, share structuring, capital structuring, and even joint ventures. Additionally, they can help companies with their corporate secretarial requirements, including maintaining statutory registers and fulfilling their annual filing requirements. Another intriguing proposition is their real-time entity health checks, which are instant assessments of whether entities are aligned with local regulations. 

Nominee directors and registered office services are another service for countries that require positions to be reserved for local directors on the ground. Furthermore, clients can take advantage of the company’s registered office services, eliminating the need to rent office space manually.

2. Accounting and Tax Compliance

Outsource your accounting and financial reporting requirements, with bookkeeping and tax accountancy services. Dezan Shira supplies financial professionals with local knowledge of the reporting systems in the country you’re based in. Moreover, they can also offer virtual CFO services and treasury reporting that encompasses multiple jurisdictions.

• Unlike other professional services firms, Dezan Shira goes even further by offering comprehensive financial auditing services. These audits can be oriented to ensure compliance with not just local accounting principles but also internationally recognized standards, including IFRS and GAAP.

Clients can also take advantage of a full spectrum of tax planning and compliance services, covering issues like corporate income tax, personal income tax, transfer pricing, and cross-border tax. Dezan Shira relies on an integrated model in this case to ensure that tax, auditing, and accounting teams are fully aligned to avoid inadvertently creating siloes and compromising service consistency. 

3. Business Advisory

Most advisory services focus on setting up business entities and compliance. Dezan Shira offers all of this, but they go further by providing tailored strategic insights and business intelligence for the Asian investment landscape.

Dezan Shira’s advisory services start with initial market entry concerns, including choosing the country that’s best suited for your operations, before drilling deeper to cover issues like individual licensing requirements, best-practice legal structuring, and operational planning. These services can also discuss complex issues like: 

• Supply chain tariffs
• Market benchmarking
• Partner matching
• Location selection
• M&A target identification
• Financial due diligence requirements
• Intellectual property issues

These advisory services are not only customized to suit individual investors and business leaders but also incorporate the latest market commentaries coming out of your target jurisdiction and the continent as a whole. 

4. Other Services

Dezan Shira positions itself as an end-to-end professional services firm with all of the corporate services you could ever need under one roof. Each of their services is designed to be high-value and relevant for businesses of all sizes at every stage of their respective growth cycles.

Some of the other services they offer include: 

• Entity Exit Services: Just like they support businesses in moving into new markets, they also support businesses going the other way. They include all the relevant exit services to guarantee a timely exit, including regulatory filings, final tax declarations, and deregistration.
• Legal Document Services: Document handling is another part of their service packages. They can handle all forms of business documentation, including legalization, IP filings, and business contracts. Additionally, they can assist with document legalization services, like translations, apostilling, and notarization.
• HR and Payroll Outsourcing: Clients can outsource their back-office functions via Dezan Shira’s co-employment model. They cover HR and payroll processing through their own asiaadmin platform, allowing companies to have a complete back office in their chosen jurisdiction without the hassle of formally hiring employees.
• Recruitment Support: Sourcing local talent is often a challenge for newcomers into a market. Dezan Shira offers regional recruitment support services to help companies not just find new hires, including at the executive level, but bring them into the fold, with negotiation and onboarding services.
• Mobility Support: Companies choosing to move their staff abroad can use the firm’s Global Mobility service. This is the name for Dezan Shira’s support services for expat staff, which cover applying for work visas, residency permits, and registering expat staff for income and social security withholding.

Dezan Shira Support

Dezan Shira may be headquartered in Hong Kong. Still, it relies on a series of regional help desks located within Asia and outside of Asia to offer support to clients located all over the world. Each of their regional desks provides an array of professionals with specific expertise in different areas to provide specialist support to clients, based on their queries.

On their contact page, Dezan Shira guarantees that all inbound inquiries will receive a response within a single business day, and the evidence shows that they largely seem to follow through on this promise.

Resources

Dezan Shira aims to be the number one professional services company in Asia, which is why they regularly publish resources to demonstrate their expertise and thought leadership. They’re the publisher behind the Asia Briefing magazine, where they discuss region-specific issues. Under this are their country-specific publications, including Vietnam Briefing, India Briefing, and so forth.

Additionally, Dezan Shira publishes Doing Business Guides for each country and has an entire repository of videos, podcasts, and webinars on its Asiapedia platform with practical steps for dealing with country-specific issues. It’s one of the most comprehensive client-facing resource networks targeted towards doing business in Asia.

Dezan Shira Pricing

Dezan Shira doesn’t publish any standardized rate cards. As with most companies in this industry, bespoke quotes are the norm because of the nature of these services. Since most clients will use a range of services chosen based on their circumstances, the company prefers to provide quotes based on the results of an initial consultation.

Although it can be frustrating not to have these prices readily available, the goal is to ensure that clients only pay for what they actually need. The downside is that price comparison becomes far more time-consuming, since you’ll need to engage them via a consultation first.

Dezan Shira Pros and Cons

Every professional services operation has its pros and cons. Dezan Shira’s pan-Asia structure allows it to leverage a range of advantages, but that, of course, also means weaknesses in other areas. Here are the main pros and cons to help you decide whether Dezan Shira is right for you:

Pros

• Robust Pan-Asia Coverage: Dezan Shira is present in over 15 countries, with an enormous number of wholly-owned offices in countries as diverse as the United Arab Emirates, Mongolia, China, and Thailand. This gives it one of the largest networks in Asia, and its wholly-owned offices ensure you get the consistent service quality you expect across jurisdictions.
• Integrated Advisory Services: The firm blends its teams together, giving clients the benefit of being able to manage all of their needs under the same umbrella. They provide advisory services that cover everything from incorporation and legal compliance to tax strategy and business intelligence. It cuts out the vendor fragmentation and keeps your pipeline streamlined.
• Outsourcing Capabilities: Setting up in a new market doesn’t have to mean building a whole back office. Dezan Shira’s outsourcing services are delivered via its asiaadmin service, where HR and payroll teams are managed via a cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) platform.
• Responsive Client Support: Client support is where so many companies fall short, but Dezan Shira excels in. With its guarantee of responding to inquiries within a single business day, client testimonials back up the fact that its client support isn’t just fast but effective.

Cons

• No Published Prices: Clients in the early stages of their comparisons may be frustrated by the fact that fees are tailored and require scheduling a consultation to get an idea of the costs. This slows down the early-stage shortlisting process, which can be problematic for clients on tight deadlines.
• Average employee reviews: A score of 3.6 for employee reviews on Glassdoor out of 127 reviews, is slightly lower than the global average (3.7). Of course internal dissatisfaction doesn’t necessarily mean a lower quality customer service. 

Unique Selling Point

Dezan Shira excels in terms of its local expertise within the Asian market. The region has long been dogged by issues of excessive regulation and bureaucracy, which have put off investors in the past. Teaming up with an operation like Dezan Shira provides the local team with the expertise needed to navigate the various regulatory requirements and registration processes needed to operate in these countries.

You can benefit from its direct access to experienced advisors in each of the countries within its network, including China and India. Additionally, unlike many of its competitors, it doesn’t use affiliates or remote consultants to bloat the size and prominence of its network artificially. When you work with this firm, you know you’re receiving the support of a genuine expert on the ground.

Overall Assessment: Dezan Shira & Associates

Dezan Shira is one of the oldest professional services firms serving international clients in Asia. It enjoys over three decades of experience in supporting clients from its headquarters in the business-friendly jurisdiction of Hong Kong. With authentic end-to-end services covering some of the most complex markets in this part of the world, its greatest appeal is the in-country expertise that deals with everything from local regulations and tax to the cultural aspects of doing business here.

Even though its pricing system can be frustrating and some of its affiliates have been questioned regarding their senior-level expertise, the vast majority of its clients have been impressed by the service quality on offer. For operations seeking to establish an Asian or pan-Asian presence, Dezan Shira is well worth shortlisting.

For SMEs looking for more tailored expansion support, at transparent prices, we suggest getting in touch with us at MSA for customized Asia expansion support. 

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