Azuka Azinga, the Acting Registrar-General, Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), has disclosed the total number of business names the Commission registered in the last three years.
According to Azinga, a total of 327,676 business names were registered while 41,719 Incorporated Trustees were registered.
Azinga further made known that the breakdown of the filings showed that registered companies recorded 145,329 fillings, business names recorded 26,593 filings, while 18,156 incorporated trustee filings were returned in the period under review.
More so, Azinga asserted that the total number of entities that had been registered by the commission since inception to date is 2,853,692.
The breakdown of the figure showed that 1,671,079 businesses were registered as limited liability companies, 1,115,429 entities were registered under business names while the remaining 67,185 were registered as incorporated trustees.
New registrations dipped
The CAC made known that it registered 85,635 new companies in 2018. It said the number of newly registered companies dropped by 2.57 per cent in 2018, compared to the 87,891 companies that were registered in 2017.
The drop in newly registered companies may suggest Nigerians are indifferent to the lower costs.
The CAC under its Business Incentive Strategy (BIS) reduced the cost of business name registration from N10,000 to N5,000, for an initial period of three months which covered October 1 to December 31, 2018.
Subsequently, CAC extended its cost reduction period of business registration till Saturday, March 31, 2019. CAC made this announcement via its Twitter handle.
Following this move, those who tend to register business names would not just enjoy the cost reduction from N10,000 to N5,000 but will also be privileged to be beneficiaries of the period extension.
Why CAC extended the reduction cost deadline
The move to extend the reduction cost deadline, according to the Corporation, is to deepen the benefits of its reform initiatives.
More so, the extension aims at enabling more micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to formalize their businesses, which will enable them to own corporate account with banks, have access to loans, grants and other government interventions.
It would be recalled that as part of efforts to enhance the ease of doing business in Nigeria, the commission announced some far-reaching decisions, part of which is the company incorporation in 24 hours policy.
The commission had in February last year also concluded plans to close manual registration of businesses and corporations.
