ISLAMABAD: The Covid-19 pandemic has severely affected businesses across the globe, but Pakistan has witnessed 24 per cent corporate growth in 2020.

In the outgoing year, the SECP registered 20,324 new companies, compared to 16,456 in 2019.

The data compiled by the SECP showed that the simplification of the registration process was one of the key factors that stimulated growth in registration of companies.

The SECP reduced the number of procedures for business start-up, reduction in overall turnaround time for regulatory approvals and introduced cost-cutting measures of starting a business, especially for small and medium enterprises.

Officials said that during Covid-19 and lockdown periods, organisations speedily enabled online facilities to maintain the workflows and resulted in an increased trend of using online services, and 98.66pc companies registered online in 2020.

The adverse impact of Covid-19 was quite evident in registration of foreign companies. In 2020 only 24 foreign companies got registration whereas the number was 38 in 2019.

The foreign companies were from the US, UK, France, Germany, China, Japan, Australia, Middle East countries and Far Eastern Countries.

The government relief package of Rs30 billion for the construction sector also had positive impact as there was 32pc growth in registration of new companies in the construction and real estate sector to 3,383 in 2020.

The Covid-19 badly affected the tourism sector as just 677 companies were registered compared to 1,027 in 2019.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2021