Appleby: Company Incorporations On The Rise

Bermuda experienced 4% year-on-year growth in new company registrations in 2014, with more than 1,000 companies incorporating in the jurisdiction for the second year in a row, according to a report released today [June 3] by Appleby.

In total, 1,113 new companies incorporated in Bermuda in 2014, according to the firm’s latest On the Registerreport, which provides insight and data on company incorporations in offshore financial centres and focuses on the full year 2014. This marked an increase over the 1,066 registrations in 2013 and included local, exempted and non-resident companies.

“Having topped over a thousand new incorporations for the first time in five years in 2013, Bermuda improved on that figure in 2014,” said Rory Gorman, Managing Director of Appleby Services [Bermuda] Ltd. “The quarterly spread of these new companies was very even over the year, without any apparent peaks and troughs.”

The main growth in 2014 came from exempted companies, of which 888 were incorporated, the same figure as 2013 and up on 743 in 2012. Exempted companies are entities which transact business with non-Bermudian persons or with other exempted companies. The other new incorporations included 69 overseas companies and 156 local companies.

The report noted that in March 2015, the Bermuda government restated the jurisdiction’s registry data. The numbers were republished, trimming around 2,000 companies from the register. While the numbers of new incorporations were largely unaffected by this restating of total numbers of registered companies, the total registry size reduced.

When looking at all the offshore jurisdictions examined in On the Register, there were 93,159 new offshore company incorporations in 2014, slightly behind the previous year’s number. The level of new company incorporations rose or remained level in all but two jurisdictions.

“There are 672,500 companies now registered across the offshore jurisdictions in which we operate, some 45,000 more than there were five years ago in the immediate aftermath of the global recession,” said Farah Ballands, Partner and Global Head of Fiduciary & Administration Services at Appleby.

“Most offshore jurisdictions have had a good year, reporting increases to the total number of active companies on their registers of between 1% and 4%.”