SPARK begins to offer information about companies in Moldova

Moldova has become the latest country in the former Soviet Union, information about the companies of which has become available in the SPARK information and analysis system.

"SPARK continues to expand its international coverage, both with new countries and by increasing the number of international corporate relationships, which already cover dozens of countries," Interfax Group Vice President Roman Laba said.

Information about Moldovan companies offered by SPARK includes: company name, IDNO identification number (similar to Russia‘s Individual Taxpayer Number, or INN), date of registration, classifier of forms of ownership, address, company status, CEO, founder and the company‘s industry. The system also provides telephone numbers and the number of employees for some legal entities.

"In future, we expect to increase the amount of information about Moldovan companies with new sources," Laba said.

There were 171,000 legal entities and individual entrepreneurs registered in Moldova (not including Trans-Dniester region) as of June 1, 2016. This included 94,000 limited liability companies (SRL); 62,000 individual entrepreneurs (II); 4,596 joint-stock companies (SA); and almost 4,000 cooperatives (COOP), according to the Registration Chamber. But there were only 117,000 actually active legal entities that were not in the process of liquidation or bankruptcy, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Registration Chamber data show that 53% of all companies operate in the wholesale and retail trade sector; 12% in manufacturing; 6% in agriculture; 5% in transportation and communications; and 4% in the hotel and restaurant business.

In terms of foreign capital, the leader is neighboring Romania, residents of which are among the founders of 1,600 companies. Romania is followed by Italy with 1,228 companies, Turkey with 1,126, Ukraine with 970 and Russia with 951.

About 6,000 new legal entities are registered in Moldova every year. The number of liquidated companies rose to 3,900 in 2015 from less than 3,000 annually in 2013-2014.

In addition to Russia, the SPARK system offers data on legal entities in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.

SPARK (www.spark-interfax.ru), the Interfax Group‘s best known IT service, has become the standard in Russia for providing information about companies. The system, which is used for verification of counterparties and risk management, handles more than 500 million queries annually from tens of thousands of users.