Register a company in Madagascar, the vanilla island.

Yes - EDBM incorporation, tax registrations and zone applications run by power of attorney. Banks like meeting the gérant once, and farm-network or factory projects reward presence for their own reasons. We sequence one Tana trip where it earns most.

Turnkey registration starts at $2,400, with banking at $4,400. Entreprise-franche status and commodity export licenses are scoped per project. Renewals with accounting start at $1,500 per year.

The entreprise franche licenses export-oriented companies - historically textiles, increasingly agri-processing and services - into a regime of five years' corporate-tax exoneration then 10%, duty-free inputs, and free repatriation of export earnings. Qualification turns on genuine export orientation, and four decades of zone factories prove the state honours the deal. For exporters it is the whole tax strategy.

Corporate tax at 20%, VAT at 20%, dividends around 10%, employer social contributions near 13%. Mining concessions negotiate their own fiscal terms. The arithmetic is simple; the planning is the regime election and - for commodity people - the license calendar.

On seasons and relationships: campaign licenses govern buying and export windows, curing quality decides price tiers, and exporters with real farm networks in the Sava region hold the keys - newcomers partner into networks rather than conjuring them. Prices swing famously (vanilla has boomed and crashed within single decades), so serious traders hedge with contracts and diversify into cloves and cacao. We structure licensed exporters with open eyes on everything.

Quietly, yes: French firms run customer service, back-office, and accounting operations here at costs below those in Morocco or Senegal, drawing on educated, French-fluent graduates in Tana and Antsirabe. Connectivity via submarine cables is adequate and improving; power backup is a planning line. For francophone outsourcing models, the island is one of the sharpest arbitrages available.

Persistently soft - depreciation is the trend, not the exception, and planning assumes it: exporters are structurally hedged (world prices in, island costs out - the entire island thesis), importers price with discipline, and hard-currency balances sit beside ariary floats. Export-proceeds rules require repatriation and conversion shares; our banking setup configures the compliance from day one.

Hard enough to engineer for: JIRAMA's outages make generators and solar-plus-storage standard equipment for factories; roads to farm regions test vehicles and schedules; the port at Toamasina - expanding under Japanese financing - carries the trade. Businesses that budget infrastructure as a cost line thrive; those that assume it suffer. We model it honestly in every physical plan.

Cycles are real: the 2025 transition replaced the leadership, as earlier episodes did before it - and through each, the ports loaded, the zones stitched, and the vanilla shipped. The continuity of business machinery through political weather is the island's underrated fact. We track developments and structure conservatively: licenses in order, compliance clean, and operations that any administration values.

The company: one to three weeks through the EDBM. Banking: one to three more. Zone status: three to eight weeks. Commodity licenses: by campaign calendar. A working, banked Malagasy exporter inside six weeks - with regime and licenses maturing alongside - is the honest default.