Can Any Business Enjoy Lower Taxes by (Partially) Relocating to Dubai?

Most offshore consulting firms only work with clients that have location independent businesses. Some bigger firms work with everyone, but charge accordingly. We work with all types of businesses - location-dependent and -independent at a reasonable cost.

Even location-dependent businesses with immovable physical locations may reduce their corporate tax load by opening an offshore company in a low-tax country.

For obvious reasons, location independent businesses such as consulting firms, software developers (SAAS), content creators, Amazon FBA sellers, e-commerce entrepreneurs and affiliate marketers may easily relocate their business location to low tax offshore destinations like Dubai. Such location independent businesses have fewer, but still important tax issues to deal with in the process of relocating their tax residency.

However, even if you operate a location-dependent business such an architecture firm, trading company, product development company or physical storefronts, international income-tax optimization is possible.

In those cases you would keep your existing business(es) in your high tax home country, and open a new legally separate company in an offshore location such as the UAE.

You can then slowly but systematically move intellectual property, administrative and managerial tasks to the new offshore company.

Doing so, you reduce profits in your home country company, and increase profits in your offshore company, thus reducing the tax incidence in your home country.

Setting up a legal and effective offshore company or holding structure that reduces your company tax load is complex and tricky as governments have put in place a wide range of laws and regulations to counter such activities. These include withholding taxes, transfer pricing regulations, exit taxes and more.

As a result, most online consulting firms work exclusively with location-independent businesses. It is easier for them.

For all other businesses, until now, the only option was to work with large consulting firms such as PWC or EY in structuring your offshore business. These will charge you USD30K+ just for a basic consultation. Working with them to execute their recommended plan will add another USD100K.

At The Dubai Navigator, we have developed cost effective strategies that allow virtually any business to reduce its corporate tax incidence without spending tens of thousands on consulting fees. Learn more here.