Setting up your business
in Côte d'Ivoire
From the market study to your first invoice.
You are a foreign company or a private investor, and you want to start or grow a business in Côte d'Ivoire. We look at the options, we recommend the one that fits your case, and we put it in place with you.
What kind of project is it?
Our clients are foreign companies that want to sell, manufacture or set up here, and individuals who invest. Some are arriving for the first time; others already operate locally and want to expand, or to change a structure that no longer matches what they actually do.
The question they ask is always the same — where to start, and in what order — but the answer is not the same for every project. Here are the six situations people bring to us most often.
Does your project fit none of these? That is often true of the most complex operations.
Our approach
In setting up a business, the expensive part is almost never the paperwork: it is the decision taken without knowing what follows from it. That is where we come in.
A team that has run businesses here
Our team is made up of people who have founded and run companies in Côte d'Ivoire. They do not only know the texts: they know how a sector works, what an authority expects, what a local practice is worth against a written rule, and what a decision costs once you are on the ground.
Local and international, held together
A lot of advice stops at the border. Tax treaties, the multilateral instrument, transfer pricing, beneficial ownership, the obligations of the parent company's country: we handle that side as well as Ivorian procedure, and we show you how to make the two hold together.
Straight advice, not flattery
Our job is not to reassure you about your project, but to check that it holds. Margin swallowed by logistics, a tax relief that comes with obligations you cannot meet, a structure that costs more than planned: some projects do not survive contact with the ground. If yours is one of them, we will tell you before you spend anything.
Discretion is part of the service
We publish neither our clients' names, nor our partners', nor the details of the files we handle. People who bring us a project expect that nothing will come out before they have decided it should, and we apply the same rule to everyone.
French, English, Italian. Your file is handled in your language, by someone who works in it — not translated afterwards.
What we cover
Whatever the starting point, the same questions come up: under what form, with what tax treatment, under what customs regime, before which authority. A file almost always touches several at once, and it is the order between them that sets the timetable and the cost.
Relevance and feasibility of the project
- The real size and structure of the market you are after, the competition already in place, the distribution channels that actually work.
- Regulatory and sector barriers, the authorisations you cannot do without, the delay to expect before your first invoice.
- Cost assumptions: capital, premises, staff, tax, logistics, and the cash the first year will take.
- At the end, you know whether the project holds, and in what form it holds best. That is where most of our files start.
Form and structure
- SARL, SAS, SA, subsidiary or branch: which one carries your project, your tax position and your exposure.
Local taxation
- Assignment to a tax office, declaration of existence, access to the online services, filing obligations and the calendar to keep.
International taxation
- Treaties, the multilateral instrument, transfer pricing, beneficial ownership: what your structure actually produces.
Customs and foreign trade
- Customs regimes, tariff classification, import approvals: what your supply chain costs and what it demands.
Approvals and incentives
- Investment code, sector regimes: what you are entitled to, and what it commits you to.
Authorities and institutions
- Who decides what, in what order, and where the file is lodged.
Trusted partners and providers
- Banks, professional firms, freight forwarders, landlords, suppliers, recruiters: we put you in touch, sector by sector, with people we have already seen at work.
Compliance and banks
- Beneficial ownership, correspondent bank due diligence: what your bank will ask for, and when.
The formalities that follow — one-stop shop, trade register, legal notices, social security registration — are carried out in the same file, by the same people.
Write to us
A project, a question, or simply a doubt about what to do next. Tell us where you stand and in which language you want to be contacted: you will get a reply from the person who will handle the file, not an acknowledgement of receipt.
PROGICI SARL
Your project
A few lines are enough.
What you write stays between you and the person who will handle your file.