RAKEZ offers commercial, service, industrial, educational, media and e-commerce licences. The right one depends on your activity, like a commercial licence to trade goods, a service licence for consultancy, or an industrial licence to manufacture. You can combine activities under one licence within the same group, subject to RAKEZ approval.
Picking the wrong RAKEZ licence type isn’t usually a dramatic mistake, it’s a quiet one. Founders pick something close enough, get approved, and only realise months later that their actual business activity doesn’t quite match what’s on the licence. Getting this right at the start saves you an amendment process later, so let’s map it out properly.
What Are the Different Types of RAKEZ Licences?
RAKEZ structures its licences around what your business actually does, not around some generic “trading” catch-all, and understanding each category makes the rest of this decision much easier.
A commercial licence covers trading activity, buying and selling goods, whether that’s general trading, import and export, or a specific product category. If your business moves physical products from one party to another, this is almost always your starting point.
A service licence covers consultancy, professional services, and anything where you’re delivering expertise or a service rather than a physical product. Marketing agencies, IT consultancies, management advisory, and similar businesses fall here.
An industrial licence covers manufacturing, processing, and assembly activity, anything where you’re physically producing or transforming goods rather than just trading them.
Beyond these three core categories, RAKEZ also offers educational licences for training and education providers, media licences for content, publishing, and broadcasting businesses, and e-commerce licences specifically structured for online retail and digital trading models.
How Do You Map Your Business Activity to the Right RAKEZ Licence?
The mapping question comes down to one honest question, what does your business actually do day to day, not what you eventually hope it becomes.
If you’re sourcing products and reselling them, whether wholesale, retail, or online, that’s commercial. If you’re the one physically making or assembling the product, that’s industrial, even if you also sell what you make, since the manufacturing activity itself is what drives the licence category. If you’re being paid for expertise, time, or a defined service rather than a physical product, that’s a service licence, and this covers a genuinely wide range of businesses, from marketing to legal consultancy to software development services.
The mistake founders make most often here is picking based on how they think of their business informally rather than what the activity technically is. A founder who calls themselves an “e-commerce brand” but actually manufactures their own products first needs to think about the industrial component, not just default to e-commerce because that’s the customer-facing label they use.
Can You Combine Multiple Activities Under One RAKEZ Licence?
Yes, and this is genuinely useful for businesses that don’t fit neatly into a single box. RAKEZ allows you to combine multiple activities under one licence as long as they fall within the same activity group, subject to RAKEZ’s approval on the specific combination you’re requesting.
A trading business that also offers installation or consultancy services related to what it sells is a common example, commercial and service activities combined under a structure that reflects how the business actually operates. What doesn’t work is trying to combine activities from fundamentally different groups, industrial manufacturing and media production, for instance, without a clear operational link between them, since RAKEZ evaluates whether the combination makes practical business sense rather than approving any combination requested.
This is worth sorting out at the application stage rather than after, since adding activities later is possible but adds time and paperwork you could have avoided by mapping your full activity scope upfront.
What Are the Most Common RAKEZ Licence Mis-Selections?
A few patterns show up again and again, and knowing them in advance saves you from repeating someone else’s mistake.
The most common one is choosing a service licence when the business actually involves physical goods, usually because “service” sounds simpler or more modern to a founder building a digital-first brand. If any part of your business involves holding inventory, shipping products, or physical trade, a pure service licence likely doesn’t cover you correctly, even if most of your customer interaction happens online.
The second common mistake is underestimating manufacturing involvement. Founders who outsource some assembly or light manufacturing sometimes assume this doesn’t touch their licence category since they’re not personally running machinery, but if manufacturing is genuinely part of the business model, the industrial component still matters for correct licensing, even when it’s outsourced.
“The pattern I see most is founders optimising their licence choice for how the business sounds in a pitch deck instead of what it actually does operationally. A “tech-enabled logistics platform” that’s fundamentally trading and moving physical goods needs a commercial licence reflecting that, not a service licence chosen because it sounds more scalable. RAKEZ cares about the actual activity, not the framing.”
— Khusbhu Bhatia, Partner & Head of Marketing
Getting this right the first time isn’t about perfection, it’s about being honest with yourself about what your business actually does before you fill out the application, rather than discovering the mismatch when it becomes a problem.
