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🇭🇰 Hong Kong Companies Registry Search — CR Number, Director & Corporate Registry Lookup

Search Hong Kong's Companies Registry — the canonical record of every entity legally incorporated in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Returns the company name (English and Traditional Chinese), CR number (Companies Registry number — HK's universal corporate identifier), entity type, registry status, incorporation date, registered address, business nature (HKSIC industry codes), share capital in HKD, directors, company secretary, and last annual return date.

Hong Kong is the financial gateway between Mainland China and the rest of the world. Companies Registry filings are the legal ground-truth for KYC / AML compliance, M&A due diligence, cross-border VC sourcing, KYB onboarding, investigative journalism, and sanctions screening across Greater China. Every CK Hutchison, HSBC, Tencent (via HK-listed CDR), Alibaba (HK-secondary listing), Standard Chartered, Swire, Jardine Matheson, Galaxy Entertainment, and red-chip H-share entity that touches the Mainland is filed with HK's Companies Registry — and so is every cross-border holding company, VIE-structure offshore parent, and family-office SPV used to channel capital between Mainland China, Singapore, Cayman, and Delaware. The CR number is to Hong Kong what the UEN is to Singapore and the EIN is to the United States: the system-of-record identifier issued by the government, printed on every invoice, contract, and bank statement under the Companies Ordinance (Cap. 622).

This Actor solves the ICRIS search problem: HK's official Integrated Companies Registry Information System (ICRIS) at www.icris.cr.gov.hk is captcha-protected on the company-detail page and requires payment for many lookups, making programmatic lookup at scale difficult. We combine a best-effort live probe of ICRIS with a curated, publicly-disclosed universe of Hong Kong's most-searched entities (HKEX Main Board + GEM listings, the Hang Seng Index constituents, the major red-chip / H-share names, Mainland China subsidiaries operating through HK holdcos, the largest privately-held Hong Kong conglomerates, and the well-known offshore parent structures of Mainland tech companies) so you always get clean, structured data — even when ICRIS rate-limits or captcha-gates live scraping.

What you get per row

Each dataset row is a single Hong Kong Companies Registry-registered entity:

• company_name_en — the canonical English legal-entity name as registered with the Companies Registry (mixed case, including suffix like LIMITED, LTD., PLC)
• company_name_zh — the Traditional Chinese name (every HK-registered company is permitted to register a Chinese name; most do, especially Mainland-connected entities)
• cr_number — the Companies Registry number, HK's 7-digit system-of-record identifier (e.g. 0263875 for HSBC Holdings plc, 0000001-class for the oldest entities). Printed on every Hong Kong invoice and contract by law under Cap. 622.
• entity_type — PRIVATE (HK's dominant form — company limited by shares, private), PUBLIC (HKEX-listed or other public company), FOREIGN (non-Hong Kong company registered under Part 16 of the Companies Ordinance), GUARANTEE (company limited by guarantee — used for charities, NGOs, professional bodies), UNLIMITED (unlimited liability — rare)
• status — LIVE (currently active and in good standing), DISSOLVED (formally wound up and removed from the register), WINDING_UP (currently in liquidation under Part V of the Companies (Winding Up and Miscellaneous Provisions) Ordinance), STRUCK_OFF (removed from the register for non-compliance with annual return filing), DORMANT (registered but declared dormant — exempt from audit)
• incorporation_date — ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD)
• registered_address — the formal Hong Kong address on file at the Companies Registry (must be a physical HK address — not a PO Box)
• business_nature — list of HKSIC (Hong Kong Standard Industrial Classification) codes with text descriptions (NACE-equivalent for HK)
• share_capital_hkd — issued share capital in Hong Kong Dollars (or null for guarantee companies and foreign companies that don't disclose HK-level capital)
• directors — list of currently registered directors (HK requires at least one natural-person director under the 2014 Companies Ordinance reform)
• company_secretary — the appointed company secretary (every HK company must have one — a natural person resident in HK or a corporate secretary licensed under the TCSP regime by the Companies Registry)
• last_annual_return_date — ISO date of the most recent Annual Return (NAR1) filing
• data_source — icris.cr.gov.hk + HKEXnews + curated Companies Registry disclosures

8 use cases

1. KYC / AML compliance for Greater China counterparties — Hong Kong is FATF-compliant and an HKMA / SFC-regulated jurisdiction. Before onboarding a HK counterparty, verify the entity is LIVE in the Companies Registry, cross-check the CR number against the company's invoice header, and confirm the directors match the names on KYC documents. If the CR number doesn't resolve or the status is STRUCK_OFF, that's an immediate red flag — especially common with shell entities used for trade-finance fraud.

2. M&A due diligence on Greater China targets — Hunt every entity matching a parent company's brand keyword to find HK-based subsidiaries, holding companies, regional HQs, and offshore parents. Hong Kong is the legal home of the offshore parent (alongside Cayman) for most Chinese ADRs via VIE structures — if a Mainland Chinese tech, biotech, or consumer company raises USD venture capital, the cap table almost always runs through an HK Ltd. parent into a Cayman ListCo.

3. Cross-border VC sourcing — Mainland-to-offshore plays — Mainland Chinese founders incorporating an HK Ltd. before a Cayman flip-up show up in the Companies Registry months before any Crunchbase or PitchBook entry. Filter on incorporation_date_from within the last 90 days and entity_type = PRIVATE to surface fresh HK-incorporated offshore parents the moment they exist.

4. Bloomberg / S&P Capital IQ / Bureau van Dijk Orbis / Refinitiv World-Check alternative — Bloomberg's BVD Orbis and Refinitiv World-Check charge enterprise prices for the same CR number + director + company-secretary + share-capital data that's public under the Companies Ordinance. Two orders of magnitude cheaper at $0.10/company.

5. KYB onboarding pipelines for HK SMB merchants — Fintech and SaaS companies onboarding Hong Kong SMB merchants (or Greater Bay Area cross-border merchants) need to verify the legal-entity name, CR number, and director list. Pipe the output straight into Snowflake / BigQuery as the source-of-truth for the KYB step. Especially relevant for Stripe, Airwallex, Wise, Currenxie, Statrys, and Aspire onboarding flows.

6. Sanctions / PEP screening — Greater China focus — Cross-reference the directors field against OFAC SDN, EU consolidated, UK HMT, and the post-2020 US Hong Kong-related Executive Orders (EO 13936, EO 13959). HK is a known booking center for Mainland Chinese wealth — a director name match against a sanctioned PRC official warrants escalation.

7. Journalism — Mainland China beneficial-ownership tracking — Hong Kong is the most accessible window into Mainland Chinese corporate structures, because HK still maintains a relatively open public company-registry regime under the Companies Ordinance, while Mainland China's National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System is increasingly restricted. Reporters covering corruption, sanctions evasion, Belt-and-Road financing, or Mainland family wealth use HK's Companies Registry as the primary discovery layer.

8. Corporate-governance research on H-share / red-chip entities — Map director interlock networks across HK-listed entities, HKSIC sector cohorts, share-capital distributions, and the auditor concentration (Big Four vs. mid-tier) on HKEX-listed companies — feeding academic, policy, or activist-investor research.

How this Actor compares (vs. enterprise alternatives)

Bottom line: Bloomberg / S&P / BvD / Refinitiv are the right answer if you need world-spanning coverage of 400M+ legal entities across 200 jurisdictions and you already have an enterprise contract. This Actor is the right answer if you need clean, structured Hong Kong Companies Registry data for compliance, M&A, KYB onboarding, or journalism — and you want to pay $0.10 per row instead of $25,000+ per seat per year. The HK data quality is comparable on the fields that matter (CR number, English + Chinese name, directors, company secretary, share capital) because we draw from the same underlying Companies Registry filings.

Input

• search_query — partial-match name search (English or Traditional Chinese). Example: HSBC, CK Hutchison, 腾讯, Tencent, Galaxy, Swire
• cr_number — exact-match CR number (e.g. 0263875). Takes precedence over search_query when both are set.
• entity_type — ALL | PRIVATE | PUBLIC | FOREIGN | GUARANTEE | UNLIMITED
• status — ALL | LIVE | DISSOLVED | WINDING_UP | STRUCK_OFF | DORMANT
• incorporation_date_from / incorporation_date_to — ISO YYYY-MM-DD bounds
• limit — hard cap on rows returned (1-2000, default 50)

Pricing — pay per event

• apify-actor-start — $0.01 charged at run start (covers infrastructure & connection setup)
• apify-default-dataset-item — $0.10 per Hong Kong Companies Registry row pushed to the dataset

A typical 100-company KYC sweep costs $0.01 + 100 × $0.10 = $10.01. A 1,000-company HK universe pull costs $100.01.

Data quality & sourcing notes

The primary live source — ICRIS at www.icris.cr.gov.hk/csci/ — is the canonical Companies Registry public-search portal operated by the Hong Kong SAR Government. ICRIS is captcha-protected and charges a fee (HK$10-22) for full company-detail downloads on the e-Service portal, so this Actor uses ICRIS as a liveness signal and falls back to a curated universe assembled from:

• HKEX disclosure portal (hkexnews.hk) — every Main Board and GEM listing publishes its CR number, registered address, directors, company secretary, and share capital in its Annual Report and IPO Prospectus, all of which are public.
• Companies Registry free public search (www.cr.gov.hk) — the e-Monitor service that lets anyone confirm an entity's existence + status without payment.
• Stockanalysis.com HKEX coverage — overlapping HKEX-listed metadata, useful for cross-checking the English/Chinese name mapping.
• Wikipedia structured infoboxes — for the most-searched private conglomerates (Swire, Jardine Matheson, CK Hutchison, etc.) where the CR number, incorporation date, and registered address are public knowledge confirmed against the entity's own corporate website and annual reports.
• Crunchbase HK private-company coverage — for unicorns and venture-stage HK-incorporated entities.

All directors and company secretaries returned are those publicly disclosed in the most recent Annual Return (NAR1) filing or in HKEX-required Annual Reports — never private contact information.

Related NexGenData Actors

If this Actor is useful, the following sister Actors complete a Greater China + cross-border corporate-data stack:

• 🇭🇰 HKEX Hang Seng Stock Screener — Hang Seng Index + Main Board + GEM equity screener; pair with this Actor to cross-reference HKEX tickers against full Companies Registry filings
• 🇸🇬 Singapore ACRA Companies — sister jurisdiction for SE Asia corporate-registry data, identical schema shape (UEN ↔ CR number)
• 🇺🇸🇨🇳 Chinese ADRs Stock Screener — US-listed Chinese ADRs; trace the cap table back through HK holdcos into the Mainland operating entities
• 📑 SEC Form 13F Holdings Tracker — US institutional positions in HK-secondary-listed and ADR names
• 🇨🇳 Eastmoney China Stock Screener — A-share equity screener for Shanghai/Shenzhen-listed Mainland entities that often have HK parent holdcos
• 🤖 Finance MCP Server — MCP-protocol financial-data server, useful for piping HK Companies Registry results into Claude / OpenAI / Cursor agents

Legal & compliance

All data returned is sourced from public Companies Registry filings under Hong Kong's Companies Ordinance (Cap. 622) and HKEX-required public disclosures. Director names, company secretary names, registered addresses, share capital, and CR numbers are all matters of public record — every HK-registered company is statutorily required to publish them on its letterhead, website, and invoices under sections 659 and 662 of the Companies Ordinance.

This Actor does not scrape paid e-Service downloads from ICRIS; it does not bypass captchas; it does not access any non-public data. The fallback curated universe is composed entirely of entities that have voluntarily disclosed their CR number and directors via HKEXnews, their own corporate website, their annual report, or other publicly-disclosed sources.

Users are responsible for complying with the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486) when handling director names in downstream pipelines, especially when crossing into Mainland PRC processing (PIPL compliance).

About NexGenData

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