Business entities in Malaysia reached another high record

Malaysia now has 756,245 registered companies in the country as of 31 DEC 2006, according Commerce & Consumer Report 2006 or Companies Commissions of Malaysia (SSM). That's one company every 33 individual in Malaysia, based on the latest statistics of 26.64-million population by Department of Statistics Malaysia (or about two million less according to US-CIA report in 2007).

Of course as we've stated earlier, only about 500,000 of these companies are actively operating as of last year per January 2007 report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Malaysian SMEs which also states that the micro companies constitute about 80% in numbers of all active business entities in Malaysia.

Here are some big numbers revealed in the Star's news report headlined "Number of firms registered in Malaysia reach record 756,245":

KUCHING: The number of local and foreign companies registered in the country touched a new high of 756,245 as of Dec 31 last year.

The number of new local firms registered last year grew by 5.4% to 752,078.

The growth was more impressive for the registration of new foreign companies, which jumped to 41 from 30 in 2006, an increase of 36.7%, according to the 2006 Commerce and Consumer Report launched here on Thursday.

With the increase, the report said the total number of foreign companies on the register reached 4,172.

Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Minister Datuk Mohd Shafie Apdal, who launched the report, said the number of new business registrations in the second half of last year showed a strong rise of 22.5%.

The ministry’s statistics for the first quarter of this year revealed that 9,841 new companies were registered, up from 8,909 in the fourth quarter of last year.

Mohd Shafie said the overall growth of 5.9% in the wholesale and retail trade, hotel and restaurant sectors was the same as that of the overall economy last year.

“Its contribution to the GDP remained unchanged at 14.7%, making it the second largest services sub-sector after finance, insurance, business and real estate,” he added.

In a separate press statement, the ministry said the Tribunal of Consumer Claims received 1,886 claims in the first three months of this year.

Of the number, 1,085 claims were on goods and the other 801 were about services.

Feeling entrepreneurial now?

Now, imagine what you can sell to these 500,000 local businesses... Imagine selling your products and/or services to 1% of these businesses, i.e. 5,000 enterprising customers. Or what you can buy from them!