Estonia, one of the world’s most digitally advanced countries, is inviting South African business owners, entrepreneurs, and innovators to expand their businesses to the EU market through its e-Residency offering.
With an Estonian e-Residency, SA entrepreneurs can establish and run EU-based companies entirely remotely and 100% online from anywhere in the word.
This gives local innovators a strategic entry point to the EU with its stable, transparent, and business-friendly environment.
Mats Kuuskemaa, country director for Estonia's e-Residency programme, spoke with ITWeb Africa about the project's rationale.
He said: Estonia’s e-Residency programme recently celebrated our 11th birthday. We are a government-initiated programme with global reach with over 130,000 e-Residents from 180+ countries who have established over 38,000 new businesses in Estonia, including 1 out of 10 of Estonia’s tech unicorns (with USD 1+ billion valuation).
“The programme has brought a lot of diversity to Estonia’s startup ecosystem whilst 39% of Estonia’s startups have e-Resident founders. Likewise, e-Residency has also made EU market globally accessible, enabling new growth opportunities to founders from all corners of the world."
Kuuskemaa continued: “As we do not have any Embassy of Estonia in Southern Africa region, it has been difficult for South African founders to access e-Residency as receiving it has required a trip to Europe or the Middle East to pick up their e-Residency kit.
“Due to this reason, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia is organising a special one-time e-Residency delivery mission, allowing South Africans to pick up e-Residency in Cape Town and Johannesburg. To participate in this one-time opportunity, e-Residency applications would need to be submitted by 19 December 2025.”
E-Residency costs 150 Euros (3000 ZAR) per person and needs to be renewed every 5 years. Starting a company state fee is 265 Euros (5200 ZAR). General costs of running an Estonia-based business, including accounting; yearly report and Estonian address costs generally between 50-200 Euros (1000-4000 ZAR) per month.
He went on to explain how the program can benefit Southern Africa benefit, saying: “E-Residency works in four steps: (i) founders who would like to be major shareholders or directors of an EU company would need to apply for e-Residency online; (ii) their applications will be processed and they would need to personally pick up their e-Residency; (iii) founders can select a service provider from e-Residency marketplace, enabling an Estonian address for their company as well as accounting, as soon as they start reporting revenues; (iv) founders can also apply for an EU bank account for their company.”
According to Kuuskemaa, founders with an Estonia-based business benefit in several ways, including with better access to EU market to find clients, business partners and in some cases also funding.
He said: “Starting and running a business in Estonia means less bureaucracy via using the online services and tools.
“An Estonian company is an extremely flexible vehicle in a trusted EU startup ecosystem. Estonia’s Startup Visa and digital Nomad Visa also allow founders to spend extended time in EU in case they wish to do so as well as to move employees from outside Europe to work in Estonia.”
Regarding how taxation work with the e-Residency scheme, Kuuskemaa responded: “Estonia has a very favourable tax system, allowing companies to reinvest their profits and in Estonia profits are only taxed at the moment that they are distributed as dividends. For this reason Estonia has been ranked #1 in International Tax Competitiveness Index for over 10 years.
“Estonia and South Africa have not yet concluded a double taxation treaty. Nevertheless, Estonia does apply double taxation avoidance principles on all countries, meaning that should an e-Residency company get tax compliance in another country i.e. South Africa then Estonia applies similar principles on avoiding double taxation as it does on countries
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