ZimCompany › Investing in Zimbabwe
A foreign investor, or a company registered outside Zimbabwe, can own a Zimbabwean company outright. Ownership carries no residency or citizenship requirement. What foreign ownership adds is a mandatory Zimbabwean company secretary, a registered office in Zimbabwe, registration with the Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency where foreign shareholding reaches 51%, exchange control approval when shares in an existing company are acquired, and ownership limits in fourteen reserved sectors under Statutory Instrument 215 of 2025.
Last verified 10 September 2026. We confirm your timeline in writing before you pay.
Three kinds of reader end up here. An individual who is not a Zimbabwean citizen and wants to put money into a Zimbabwean business. A company registered somewhere else, opening a Zimbabwean subsidiary to contract, invoice, employ or bid locally. And a mixed group, where some owners are Zimbabwean citizens and some are not.
All three get a price from the questionnaire rather than a sales call. One case does not, and it is named on this page rather than buried: buying into a company that already exists, where exchange control approval can apply to the acquisition of the shares.
Nothing on this page is legal advice. It is the list of requirements we work to, with the source for each one, so you can take it to your own adviser and check it.
A Private Limited Company is the route for a company registered outside Zimbabwe. Section 253(1) of the Companies and Other Business Entities Act [Chapter 24:31] provides that only individual natural persons acting in their own right may be members of a Private Business Corporation, and that no partnership, association or body corporate may be a member, whether directly or through a nominee. A corporate parent therefore holds shares in a Private Limited Company; it cannot hold a PBC at all.
An individual who is not a Zimbabwean citizen can use either. No section of the Act imposes a residency or citizenship requirement on a PBC member, and section 248(1)(d) accepts the number of any other official identity document where a member has no Zimbabwean national identity number, which a foreign passport satisfies. A Private Limited Company brings the board duties with it: section 195(2) requires at least one director ordinarily resident in Zimbabwe and section 198(1) requires a company secretary ordinarily resident in Zimbabwe.
That reading of the Act is ours, and we have it confirmed by a legal practitioner rather than offering it here as legal advice. Pages elsewhere on the open web assert that a PBC needs a Zimbabwean member, without citing a section. We cite ours so you can check it.
Registration with the Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency is reported to apply to a Zimbabwean company with 51% or more foreign shareholding. ZIDA also runs a One Stop Investment Services Centre that facilitates company and tax registration, permits and sector licences, which is why it appears in your estimate as a line rather than as an afterthought.
The ZIDA fees themselves: Reported by Harare consultancies as a US$500 application fee and a US$4,500 licence fee, payable to ZIDA at cost; we confirm the current figures with ZIDA before you pay.
Our own work on a ZIDA application is quoted differently. Quoted after a short consultation. ZIDA fees are separate and are paid to ZIDA at cost. There is no published figure for it on this site and there will not be one until the line has been through the same pricing gate as everything else. Quoting you a number we have not costed would be worse than telling you we have not costed it.
What a licensed investor may qualify for in the way of tax incentives is deliberately absent from this page. The exact wording has to come from the Act or from ZIDA before we repeat it, and a tax incentive you plan around and then do not get is an expensive thing to have read on a website.
Statutory Instrument 215 of 2025, the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment (Foreign Participation in Reserved Sectors) Regulations 2025, gazetted December 2025, reserves fourteen sectors. Foreign participation in a reserved sector is capped at 25% of the equity, and Zimbabwean citizens must hold at least 75%.
An existing foreign-held business in a reserved sector divests to a cumulative 25% in year one, 50% in year two and 75% in year three. Regularisation plans were due to the Ministry of Industry and Commerce by 31 January 2026.
Our source is a law firm network summary rather than the gazette itself, so we confirm your position before you pay rather than claiming to know it. A questionnaire answer is usually broader than a gazetted activity, so your estimate names the activity rather than telling you a whole industry is closed. Transport is the clearest example: taxis and omnibuses are reserved, and other logistics work is not named.
If you intend to sell to the Zimbabwean government, the difference between owning a Zimbabwean company and bidding as a foreign supplier has a published annual price. A locally registered small or medium enterprise pays around US$50 to US$75 per category per year to stay on the supplier register. A foreign bidder pays US$850 a year.
What the procurement authority is looking at is where the company is registered, not whose passport is behind it. A Zimbabwean company owned by a foreign parent bids on the local fee. The gap repeats every year you bid.
Those fee figures come from a secondary analysis of the 2026 fee structure. The procurement authority publishes no fee page of its own, and supplier registration is currently paused for a system upgrade, so we run a waitlist and charge nothing until it reopens.
ZimCompany is a coordination desk, not a law firm and not a registry. Anything that amounts to legal advice is referred to a legal practitioner, and we say that before you ask rather than after.
Where you need a legal practitioner we say so and refer you, rather than answering and hoping. That is not caution for its own sake: advising on a share structure or an exchange control position is reserved work under the Legal Practitioners Act [Chapter 27:07], and a coordination desk that quietly does it is not a desk you should trust with the rest of your file either.
Twelve questions, about three minutes, and the second one asks who will own the company. Answer that any of the three foreign ways and you get a price, not a callback.
The estimate is built the same way as anybody else: the filing bundle the rest of your answers point at, our fee and the government fees as separate numbers. What foreign ownership adds is shown as its own named lines rather than folded into a bundle price, so you can see exactly what the law is charging you for.
One outcome is a conversation instead of a price, and only one: a foreign owner buying into a company that already exists. Exchange control approval can apply to acquiring the shares, and a price we might have to withdraw is worse than a conversation.
Outside the reserved sectors, ownership carries no citizenship requirement, so yes. Inside the fourteen sectors reserved by Statutory Instrument 215 of 2025, foreign participation is capped at 25% of the equity and Zimbabwean citizens must hold at least 75%. Our source for that list is a law firm summary rather than the gazette, so we confirm your sector before you pay.
Yes. It is a statutory appointment for a foreign-owned company, not an optional extra, so it appears in every estimate we give a foreign owner as its own annual line rather than being hidden inside a bundle. A Private Limited Company separately needs at least one director ordinarily resident in Zimbabwe under section 195(2).
Registration with the Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency is reported to apply where there is 51% or more foreign shareholding. Reported by Harare consultancies as a US$500 application fee and a US$4,500 licence fee, payable to ZIDA at cost; we confirm the current figures with ZIDA before you pay. Our own assistance with the application is quoted after a short consultation and carries no published number.
Exchange control approval can apply where a person who is not a Zimbabwean citizen acquires shares in a company already registered in Zimbabwe. That is a different transaction from registering a new company, the opinion on it belongs to a legal practitioner, and it is the one route on this site where we talk to you before quoting.
Yes, of a Private Limited Company. It cannot hold a Private Business Corporation: section 253(1) of the Companies and Other Business Entities Act allows only individual natural persons acting in their own right to be members and excludes a body corporate, directly or through a nominee.
No. Work and residence permits are handled through ZIDA and the immigration authorities and are a separate process. We say so before you plan around it.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Share structures, shareholder agreements, joint venture terms, disputes and the exchange control opinion are reserved to legal practitioners under the Legal Practitioners Act [Chapter 27:07]. We refer you to one. What we carry is the filings, the statutory appointments and the calendar.
ZimCompany registers and runs Zimbabwean companies for people and businesses anywhere in the world: owners living outside Zimbabwe, foreign investors, and companies registered elsewhere that need a Zimbabwean entity. Email [email protected] or message +263 77 272 4514 on WhatsApp. We work 9:00 to 17:00 CAT, UTC+2 in Harare, Zimbabwe.
ZimCompany is a Lioncap Ventures service. Lioncap Ventures (Pvt) Ltd, registration 16326A02102024, Harare, Zimbabwe. Start with the questionnaire at https://zimcompany.com/start.