Guide

How to verify an Indonesian supplier.

Two Indonesian government systems will tell you whether a company legally exists and whether it is licensed to trade. Checking both takes an afternoon and catches most of what goes wrong before a deposit moves. What it cannot tell you is whether they can make your product.

What you can check yourself.

Legal existence: AHU Online, run by the Ministry of Law, holds the incorporation record: the entity, its directors, commissioners and shareholders. Profiles are paid, and the fee is set by the ministry.¹
Licence to operate: OSS, run by the investment ministry, issues the business identification number every operating company must hold. The number is thirteen digits.²
The cross-check that matters: A company can be properly incorporated on AHU and still have no active number on OSS. That combination means it legally exists and is not licensed to trade.²

Ask the supplier for their full legal name, their business identification number and their tax number in writing, then look each one up. A company that hesitates over this request has told you something before you have checked anything.

Where the paper stops.

A registry proves registration: It says the company exists and who owns it. It says nothing about whether they can make your product, at your quality, in your quantity, on your date.
Certificates prove a moment: A certificate shows a body assessed something once. Ask for the issuing body, the number and the expiry, then check the number with the issuer rather than looking at the PDF.
Photographs prove nothing: Factory photographs circulate between companies in the same town. A live video call from inside the building, arranged at short notice, costs nothing and settles more.

The questions a visit answers.

Whether the building matches the company. Whether the equipment can hold the tolerance you asked for. Whether the people on the floor have done this before or were hired last week. Whether the material stacked outside is the material in your specification. Whether the certificate on the wall belongs to this site or to a group member somewhere else.

None of that is visible from a registry, a catalogue or a video call, and all of it decides whether an order arrives as agreed. That is the part of the job we are paid for, and a factory audit starts at $250 depending on location.

Questions buyers ask.

Is a trading company worse than a factory?

Not automatically. A good trading company holds relationships and quality control that a small factory cannot, and a bad one adds a margin and a telephone. What matters is whether they will tell you which factory makes your goods and let you see it.

What are the warning signs?

Reluctance to give a legal name and registration number. A price far below everyone else. Photographs that appear on several companies' websites. Refusal of an unannounced video call. Any pressure to move a deposit before those are settled.

Should I use an escrow or a letter of credit?

For a first order with a new supplier, a payment instrument that releases against documents protects both sides and costs less than the loss it prevents. It is a conversation to have with your bank before you agree terms, not after.

Can you verify a supplier I already found?

Yes, and it is one of the more useful things we do. You keep the relationship and the commercial terms; we check the registrations, visit the site and report what we saw. It is the same audit whether we found the producer or you did.

Want a supplier checked?

Send us the company name and what you are buying. We come back with what the registries say, and with what a visit would cost.

Sources

1AHU Online, legal entity registry. Ministry of Law, Republic of Indonesia. Checked 3 August 2026.
2Online Single Submission, business licensing and NIB. Ministry of Investment / BKPM, Republic of Indonesia. Checked 3 August 2026.