The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) is the financial regulatory agency in Pakistan whose objective is to develop a modern and efficient corporate sector and a capital market based on sound authority principles, in order to encourage investment and foster economic growth and prosperity in Pakistan.
SECP has been proactively working on developing new tools, and simplifying registration processes for new companies. On their mission to minimize the complexity associated with company registrations, their newly developed processes have resulted in a 19% increase in registrations of new companies in October 2019.
In October, the SECP has registered 1,659 new companies, raising the number of total registered companies to 107,062. In this month, 71% companies were registered as private limited companies, 26 percent were registered as single member companies and three percent were registered as public unlisted companies, not for profit associations, foreign companies and Limited Liability Partnership (LLP). Out of the newly added companies, 96% companies were registered online and 43 % of the companies were registered in same day. Moreover, 98 foreign users completed registration from overseas.
Out of the companies being recorded in the SECP database, the following had the highest set of incorporations, industry-wise:
- Trading sector 288,
- I.T. 203
- Services 192,
- Construction 167,
- Tourism 94,
- real estate development 75,
- education 62,
- food and beverages 51,
- engineering 49,
- marketing & development 41,
- corporate agricultural farming 40,
- transport 33,
- textile 31,
- pharmaceutical 30,
- mining and quarrying 28,
- communication 27,
- chemical, fuel & energy, and logging 24 each,
- healthcare 23,
- auto and allied 20,
- power generation 14,
- cables and electric goods 13,
- paper and board 12,
- cosmetics and toiletries 11
- and 83 companies were registered in other sectors.
It was noted that Foreign investment had been seen in 42 new companies with foreign investors from Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Iran, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Norway, Oman, Qatar Singapore, the UAE, UK and the US. The highest numbers of companies were registered in Islamabad with 618, which was later followed by 441 in Lahore, 289 in Karachi, 122 in Peshawar, 65 in Multan, 64 in Gilgit-Baltistan, 37 in Faisalabad, 20 in Quetta, and 3 in Sukkur registered.
