The Ministry of Commerce and Investment announced that the growth of C.R. for Establishments reached 27% , while the Corporate by 24% during the first quarter of 2019, compared to the fourth quarter of 2018. This comes as a result of the improvements and reforms to facilitate practicing business, witnessed by the business environment during the past period.
MCI has mentioned that 68,129 C.R. have been issued for Establishments during the first quarter of 2019, compared to 53,463 C.R. during the fourth quarter of 2018. The commercial registrations for companies in the first quarter 2019 reached 4,942, compared to 3,972 C.R. in the fourth quarter of 2018.
This remarkable growth comes as a result of a number of initiatives to improve the business environment and to reduce the procedures for starting-up business. MCI has implemented a number of reforms and improvements recently, such as reducing the average time for establishing companies to 30 minutes only, also providing 62 e-services, as well as establishing more Model Customer Service Centers, under the concept of a comprehensive employee.
MCI has issued a number of resolutions to empower companies, most notably: Cancelling the issuance of sub-registers for the Establishments engaged in similar activity in the same area, amending the Commercial Registration and corporate systems, enabling holding the assemblies of the boards of directors for closed joint stock companies without prior approval of the Ministry, providing corporate decision service, issuing C.R. online, issuing the Consolidated Mortgage Register recently.
As part of facilitating business start-up, all relevant authorities have been linked with "Meras" platform, which now offers more than 112 e-services, provided by 21 government authorities.