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Comment by naveensky | Hacker News Reader

For us, its Singapore, low taxation rates, what we understand is low compliance and supports online operations. Proximity to India (5 hours by flight) makes it an ideal destination.

Factors Preventing - Nobody in my circle has this setup, making me worried about unknown challenges - Double Taxation issue. I am not clear what will be taxation liability, I have talked to multiple CAs and they all say multiple things - Transfer of IP - We are a product company and one of the CAs warned us that if we move IP of the product to the Singapore entity, it gets tricky to explain as IP was built with an Indian entity. Very gray area about this

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So I would assume you would do development in India while HQ-ing the company in Singapore ? Because I think without having business revenue in Singapore, employee costs can be quite high.

What about finding workers and payroll costs?

A lot of India based SaaS companies register in Singapore or USA while keeping their entire dev team (and sometimes even the rest of it: sales, marketing, support, etc) in India.

The incentives being ease of international transactions, capital / debt availability, simpler tax policies.

You'd still need to file taxes in India right?

The company in India only has a fraction of the total revenues and barely any profits, reducing the tax liabilities significantly.

All major costs (payroll, devs, marketing etc.) are in India. The only cost is accounting/compliance which is again it seems is lesser compared to India.

We need to file taxes in India for operations done in India, yeah so that actually means that we are increasing the overhead of compliance (adding Singapore compliance). Benefits are better funding opportunities, lesser taxation and financial tools to work for your startup.

It sounds more like your company having an offshore shell company in a tax haven rather than actually moving. These things can work well for sales outside your home country - most multinationals do something like that.

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