Company registration falls 24% in Jan; steepest since lockdown

The number of companies incorporated in January 2021 has declined nearly 24 per cent to 10,924 against total registrations of 14,358 companies a month ago. Number of new companies registered in the country saw a precipitous fall of little over 44 per cent on a month-on-month basis during March and April last year when a nationwide strict lockdown was imposed. Subsequently, monthly registration of companies recovered after hitting the lowest of 3,209 companies in April - it was down only 0.6 per cent in August and 19.5 per cent in November last year.

Meanwhile, the latest data available with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs showed that number of incorporations during the first ten months of the current fiscal grew 16.4 per cent to 1.2 lakh. A total of 1.06 lakh new firms were registered during April to January 2020.

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During the month of January 2021, a total of 10,924 companies were registered with collective authorised capital of Rs 1,183.97 crore. Of these 10,855 companies were registered as companies limited by shares with authorised capital of Rs 1,183.9 crore.

Further, a total of 21,19,813 new companies were incorporated in the country as on January 31 this year. However, close to 36 per cent of these firms were closed. Around 2,249 companies were assigned dormant status, 6,858 were under liquidation, 39,739 companies were in the process of being struck-off, the MCA data revealed.

"Active in progress status is now invalid and companies under this category lie under active status. Taking the above into account, there were 13,16,898 active companies as on January 31, 2021," it said.

The location trends remained almost unchanged with Maharashtra accounting for majority of in companies registered during the month at 19.16 per cent. This was followed by a share of 9.75 per cent and 9.7 per cent from Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, respectively.

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