Webb-site.com: The Story Behind webbsite.renavon.com

· 6 min read
corporate-data crhk companies transparency hong-kong webb-site

For anyone who followed Hong Kong's corporate world between 1998 and 2025, webb-site.com needed no introduction. Run single-handedly by David M. Webb MBE, it was the definitive independent source for Hong Kong company data, governance analysis, and fearless commentary on market misconduct. Regulators, journalists, fund managers, and researchers all relied on it. There was nothing else like it.

Webb-site.com wasn't a startup with funding rounds. It was one person's decades-long commitment to transparency in a market that often resisted it.

What David Webb Built

David Webb moved to Hong Kong in 1991 and began building webb-site.com in 1998. Over the following 27 years, he assembled an extraordinary database: every director appointment across HKEX-listed companies, CCASS beneficial ownership records dating back to 2007, Companies Registry filings, SFC licensee records, stock quotes, corporate actions, auditor changes, and court judgments. Millions of companies. Tens of millions of records. All interconnected, all searchable, all free.

The site's editorial content was equally remarkable. Webb's analysis of corporate governance failures, connected transactions, and market manipulation set the standard for independent scrutiny of Hong Kong's capital markets. His articles were cited in court proceedings, referenced by the SFC, and feared by the companies they examined.

He did this largely alone, writing scrapers in VB.NET, maintaining a MySQL database, and serving it all from Classic ASP pages on a Windows server. The technology was determinedly unfashionable. The data was irreplaceable.

The Open Source Release

In October 2025, David Webb announced that webb-site.com's servers would shut down on 31 October. He had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

In a characteristic act of generosity, he released the entire database and its source code under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. His words in the copyright notice:

It is my hope that at least one public interest entity will continue my legacy by building on these datasets and making them freely available on the web.

He also asked people to mirror the repository:

Please feel welcome to create mirrors (copies) of this "Webb-site Repository" on your own server, ideally with public access, so that if anything happens to the original Google Drive folder after my death then copies will still be available on the internet.

Carpe diem!

A Relationship Over Ten Years

I first contacted David in 2015, when he tried to sign up for accessinfo.hk, Hong Kong's freedom of information request platform that I was running at the time. His email had a characteristically direct subject line: "Signup failure." We fixed the bug.

Over the following years, our conversations ranged across Hong Kong's open data landscape. We discussed a Court of Final Appeal ruling on Trading Funds that could force the Companies Registry to lower its fees. We collaborated on a corporate investigation involving a suspicious "bank." We exchanged notes on the UK's new overseas entity register revealing Hong Kong company beneficial owners. We both attended open data conferences and commiserated about the government's resistance to making public data actually public.

What struck me most about David was that he practised what he preached. He didn't just advocate for transparency -- he built the infrastructure for it, maintained it for decades, and then gave it all away.

Building webbsite.renavon.com

When the shutdown announcement came, I knew I had to act. On 26 October 2025, I deployed the first version of webbsite.renavon.com -- a Flask application serving David's data from a PostgreSQL database on Render.com.

The migration was not trivial. The original site had hundreds of Classic ASP pages querying MySQL. I rewrote them in Python, preserving the URL structure down to the .asp extensions so that existing bookmarks and links would continue to work. Company search, people search, organisation detail pages, CCASS holdings, director positions, SFC licensee records, stock quotes -- all rebuilt to serve the same data from the same URLs.

The site now serves over 6,000 pageviews per month. People search for Hong Kong companies, look up director positions, trace corporate relationships, and check SFC licensee records -- exactly as they did on the original webb-site.com.

What's Available

webbsite.renavon.com provides free, public access to:

  • Company search and profiles -- Search by name, CR number, or business registration number across hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong companies
  • People search -- Find directors, secretaries, and other officers across companies
  • SFC licensees -- Securities and Futures Commission registered professionals and their licence history
  • CCASS holdings -- Beneficial ownership data from Hong Kong's Central Clearing system
  • Stock quotes and corporate actions -- Historical price data and dividends
  • Auditor changes -- Track which audit firms serve which companies
  • Court judgments -- Legal proceedings involving Hong Kong companies
  • Company officers and advisors -- Directors, auditors, legal advisors spanning 35 years

All of it is freely browsable, as David intended.

Programmatic Access via Renavon

While webbsite.renavon.com serves the data through a traditional web interface, Renavon makes the same Hong Kong corporate data available for programmatic use. The Hong Kong Companies Registry package includes three datasets covering companies, name history, and document filings -- queryable via SQL, downloadable as CSV or Excel, and accessible through our API.

For example, find all active companies incorporated in the last year:

SELECT
    business_registration_number,
    company_name,
    company_type,
    incorporation_date,
    company_status
FROM renavon_crhk_companies.main.crhk_companies
WHERE company_status = 'Live'
  AND incorporation_date >= '2025-04-01'
ORDER BY incorporation_date DESC
LIMIT 25;

Or trace a company's name changes over time:

SELECT
    business_registration_number,
    corporate_name,
    name_change_date,
    is_current_name
FROM renavon_crhk_company_names.main.crhk_company_names
WHERE business_registration_number = '12345678'
ORDER BY name_change_date;

The webbsite interface is for browsing individual records. Renavon is for when you need to query thousands of companies at once, build models, or feed data into your own applications.

Attribution

All data originally compiled by Webb-site.com, founded and operated by David M. Webb MBE. Released under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0. We gratefully acknowledge his 35-year contribution to transparency in Hong Kong's financial markets.

David's legacy lives on in the data he so carefully assembled and so generously shared. We intend to honour it.

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