Ask the founder of a Hong Kong restaurant group how many restaurants they run and you'll get a quick answer. Ask how many companies they run and there's usually a pause.

A real example sits on the public record. MasterBeef, the Hong Kong hot-pot group that listed on Nasdaq in 2025, ran twelve restaurants under two brands at listing. Its prospectus discloses around twenty Hong Kong operating subsidiaries underneath the holding structure. More companies than restaurants, before counting the holdco and the intermediates. Nobody designed that for fun. Hong Kong's licensing regime made it the rational shape.

Two brands. Twelve restaurants. Thirty subsidiaries.

MasterBeef Group’s disclosed structure at its April 2025 Nasdaq listing — the standard shape of a Hong Kong F&B group, at listed-company scale.

Brands

2

Restaurants

12

HK operating subsidiaries

≈20

Subsidiaries in total

30

2.5 companies per restaurant — the corporate structure outnumbers the shops it runs

The prospectus itself describes “around 20 operating subsidiaries operating in Hong Kong” — more companies than restaurants, before counting the holding companies above them.

Source: MasterBeef Group 424B4 prospectus (Apr 2025) and F-1 Exhibit 21.1, SEC EDGAR. Counts as of the prospectus date.

Why the structure happens

Start with the food licence. FEHD issues a General Restaurant Licence per premises, and it isn't portable between sites. Every new address is a new application, a new set of conditions, a new thing that can be suspended on its own.

The liquor licence is stranger: it isn't held by a company at all. Hong Kong law puts a liquor licence in the hands of a natural person, and it's a standing condition that the licensee personally supervises the premises. In practice that's an outlet manager holding the licence for their site. MasterBeef's prospectus says it plainly: the liquor licence holders for its outlets are its subsidiaries' employees.

Put licensing risk, lease negotiations, and plain liability ring-fencing together and the standard advice from every corporate services firm in town follows: put each outlet in its own limited company. If one site loses its licence, or its lease turns hostile, or a claim lands, the damage stays inside one entity. It's sensible. It's also how a restaurant group becomes a corporate group without ever intending to.

What it costs at year-end

Hong Kong then charges for that structure, every year, through two rules that surprise people who came from other markets.

First, there is no small-company audit exemption. Every active Hong Kong company has its financial statements audited annually; only dormant companies escape under s.447. Ten outlet companies is ten statutory audits, whether each outlet is a flagship or a forty-seat noodle shop.

Second, the holding company owes group accounts. Under s.379 of the Companies Ordinance, a company that's a holding company at year-end must prepare consolidated financial statements, not just its own. There are exemptions tied to ownership structure, but for a founder-held group that controls its outlet companies, the duty usually lands.

Now add the part the org chart doesn't show: the group trades with itself constantly. The central kitchen sells to every outlet. The management company recharges head-office costs. The brand entity licenses names. Every one of those internal flows has to be eliminated before the consolidation is true, and nothing can be eliminated until both entities agree on the balance. Twenty companies means the reconciliation work grows with every site you open, and all of it lands in the same few weeks as the audits.

The economics stopped forgiving slow answers

For years the honest response was: it's painful, but we manage. The market has taken that option away.

Hong Kong's restaurant receipts came in at HK$109.6 billion for 2025, up just 0.2 percent in value and down 0.9 percent in volume. That's against 49.9 million visitor arrivals, up 12 percent. The demand came back; the economics didn't. FEHD licensing data showed just over 2,000 restaurants closing in the twelve months to April 2025 against roughly 1,800 new licences, the first net decline in six years.

In that market, the question a group's books exist to answer is brutally specific: which sites are making money, and which are being carried? Answering it three months late is how operators end up funding a dying outlet through a whole extra season. And three months late is exactly what a twenty-login setup produces, because the per-outlet truth only exists after someone has rebuilt the group in a spreadsheet.

One set of books, per outlet and for the group

The structural fix leaves the companies alone. The licensing logic that created the entities is sound, and nobody should merge outlet companies to make bookkeeping easier. What has to change is each company keeping its books in isolation.

In NetSuite OneWorld, each outlet company is a subsidiary in one system. Transactions post at the entity level, so every company still has statutory books that stand on their own for its audit. The group level exists at the same moment, instead of being rebuilt weeks after close: inter-company eliminations post automatically at period end, central kitchen recharges flow to both sides at once, and the outlet P&L is readable while the outlet still has a chance to act on it.

Two honest caveats. Period-close steps still apply; eliminations run at close, with review, so think fast and repeatable rather than instant. And no software makes you compliant: s.379, the audit, and whatever exemptions apply to your structure stay with your accountants and auditor. What changes is the starting point. The close begins from one structured ledger instead of twenty exports.

Where to start

If your group added two sites this year and month-end quietly got a week longer, that's the structure talking, not the team. Our hospitality industry page covers how we configure NetSuite for Hong Kong hotel and F&B groups, and our implementation page walks through what a project actually involves. The first step is always the same: map the entity structure before anything gets built.

The licences aren't going to stop attaching to premises, and the audits aren't going to stop being annual. The only question is whether the structure Hong Kong forced on you runs on one set of books or twenty.