Business
01
Malaysia registered 60,714 new companies last year.
Every company, sole proprietorship and partnership in Malaysia starts at the same counter: SSM, the Companies Commission. Its statistics tables are the country's record of business formation — published as reports, not as a feed — and 2025 is the latest full year on the record. Alongside the companies came 353,330 new business registrations and 3,719 limited liability partnerships.
Documented · calendar 2025
60,714
new companies registered under the Companies Act 2016 across 2025 — the latest full year SSM has published
Documented · calendar 2025
353,330
new businesses — sole proprietorships and partnerships under the Registration of Businesses Act 1956 — registered in 2025
Documented · to 31 Dec 2025
1,650,853
companies on SSM's register, cumulative to 31 December 2025 — every registration since the register began, with nothing deducted when a company is later struck off
DocumentedSSM publishes these statistics as report pages, not an open data feed — this page is only as fresh as the last report. When the figures were last verified, on 10 July 2026, SSM's 2026 tables ran to June 2026: 25,846 new companies and 169,593 new businesses in the half-year so far.
Documented, not a live feed — SSM publishes these statistics as report pages, and this chapter was last verified against them on 10 July 2026. Register totals are cumulative registrations since the registers began, not counts of businesses trading today.
The MSME economy
02
Roughly one in two working Malaysians works in an MSME.
Once a year, DOSM measures what the micro, small and medium enterprises behind those registrations actually amount to. The latest release covers 2024, published 31 July 2025 — two shares carry the story.
Documented · 2024, published 31 July 2025
39.5%
of Malaysia's GDP came from MSMEs in 2024 — RM652.4 billion of value added, roughly two ringgit in every five the economy produced.
MSME output grew 5.8% that year, against 5.1% for the economy as a whole — the small end of the economy grew faster than the economy itself.
Documented · 2024, published 31 July 2025
48.7%
of total employment — 8.1 million people, roughly one in every two working Malaysians.
MSME employment grew 3.1% in 2024, and output per MSME worker reached RM80,507 — up 2.6% on the year before.
Documented from DOSM's annual MSME release — an estimate compiled once a year, not a live series. “MSME” follows SME Corp. Malaysia's official definition, by sales turnover or full-time employees.
The plan
03
What this chapter becomes.
Today this chapter is a documented snapshot — annual totals, verified by hand against the reports. Here is what it grows into as the sources open up, and the source family each step needs.
Needs: SSM data as open data
Monthly registration feeds
SSM already publishes month-by-month registration tables, and data.gov.my hosts an SSM-fed business-creation dashboard. The day that series is a maintained open dataset, the numbers above stop being hand-verified and start updating themselves.
Needs: SSM winding-up and striking-off statistics
Closures and insolvencies
Formation is half the story. SSM also records companies struck off and wound up, and business registrations that lapse — the honest measure of churn. Those figures live in reports today; this section waits for them.
Needs: SSM state tables + DOSM population
Business density by state
Registrations per thousand residents, state by state — where entrepreneurship actually concentrates. The population denominator is already live in this library; the state-level registration counts are not yet open data.
Needs: DOSM economic census and MSME sector statistics
Sector composition
What kind of businesses a town is made of — services, manufacturing, agriculture, construction. DOSM's MSME and census releases carry the sector splits; wiring them in turns shares of GDP into a map of livelihoods.
A line this chapter will not cross
Everything above is aggregate data — counts, shares and rates. This site will never build individual-company or personal-record lookups. Searching the register for a particular company or its officers is SSM's own paid service, and it stays there.
Did you know
New company registrations grew 9% in a year.
55,595 companies were registered in 2024 and 60,714 in 2025 — computed from SSM's own annual tables, the only two full years cited on this page.
SSM, Companies and Business Registered statistics, 2024 and 2025 tables
Businesses outnumber companies nearly six to one at the counter.
For every company incorporated in 2025, about 5.8 sole proprietorships or partnerships were registered — 353,330 against 60,714. Most new Malaysian enterprises are one person and a trade name, not a Sdn. Bhd.
SSM, Companies and Business Registered statistics, 2025
MSME exports grew 31.3% in 2024.
RM196.8 billion of exports came from micro, small and medium enterprises in 2024, after growth of just 3.0% the year before — the sharpest mover in DOSM's release.
DOSM, MSMEs Performance 2024 (released 31 July 2025)
Deep data
03.3
A company is not a business — and neither count is a census of the living.
SSM's tables split the economy into legal forms that behave differently in the law and in the statistics. Reading this chapter honestly means holding three distinctions at once: company versus business, registered versus alive, and what “MSME” actually measures.
Latest full year
2025
both annual registration tables published; figures verified against SSM's pages on 10 July 2026
Register · companies
1,650,853
cumulative registrations to 31 December 2025 — struck-off companies are not deducted
Register · businesses
9,697,702
cumulative since the 1956 Act — lapsed and expired registrations are never removed from this total
MSME data year
2024
DOSM's annual MSME performance release, published 31 July 2025
Two Acts, two animals
A company is incorporated under the Companies Act 2016: a separate legal entity, where — in SSM's own comparison — liability falls on the company and shareholders risk only their unpaid shares. A “business” is a sole proprietorship or a partnership of up to twenty people under the Registration of Businesses Act 1956: not a separate legal entity, with unlimited liability that SSM notes “can extend to personal assets”, registrable only by Malaysian citizens or permanent residents, and — per SSM's guidelines — covering businesses operating in West Malaysia and the Federal Territory. The LLP, a third form, sits between the two.
Registered is not alive
A business registration is valid for one to five years and simply lapses if not renewed; companies end by winding up or striking off. SSM's cumulative tables only ever add — which is how the business register reaches 9,697,702 while no one believes Malaysia has nine million trading firms. SSM does not publish a live count in these tables, so this page shows register totals, labelled as exactly that.
What “MSME” measures
The official definition, set by SME Corp. Malaysia, works on either of two tests: sales turnover or full-time employees. Micro means turnover under RM300,000 or fewer than 5 employees; the SME ceiling is RM50 million turnover or 200 employees in manufacturing, and RM20 million or 75 employees in services and other sectors. DOSM's 39.5% and 48.7% follow that definition — a measure of firm size, cutting across every legal form on this page.
Documented, not a live feed — SSM publishes these statistics as report pages, and this chapter was last verified against them on 10 July 2026. Register totals are cumulative registrations since the registers began, not counts of businesses trading today.
Registrations are where enterprise enters the record — what those firms produce lives in Economy, and the eight million people they employ live in Employment.