Dec 22, 2020
Finland’s companies API: Meet The Finnish Trade Register
All about Finland’s companies information: access to The Finnish Trade Register via Virre Information Service PRH, its free company data scope, types of businesses and the current number of companies operating in Finland.
As a company data provider, we present today another business register from which we collect data for our risk management solutions: The Finnish Trade Register. As with the previous articles in the series, you will learn what the Finnish commercial register looks like and what you can find in it, you will learn the basic Finnish names of legal forms and the number of entities currently registered in the original source.
If you want to learn more about other European commercial registers, check out our previous entries on Norway, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Meet The Finnish Trade Register Virre
The Finnish Trade Register is run by the official Finnish Patent and Registration Office PRH. This unit provides online and public access to information about Finland’s companies through Virre Information Service PRH and is also responsible for the registration of new legal entities. The data contained in this register of companies are entered by the economic activities themselves, but also by the appropriate courts and authorities.
Registered details of companies and businesses are shown in the Virre database also in English so Finland companies’ register search is not difficult to use. If you want to verify a given company in The Finnish Trade Register, just enter its business ID or name.
Importantly, access to basic company registration data, i.e. simplified extracts, is completely free. However, if we need more specific data, e.g. financial statements of Finnish companies, original copies or certificates, we will also find them in Virre Information Service PRH, but we will have to pay for them. The website of the register is perfectly adapted to this — just put the document that interests you into the shopping cart and pay for it online by a credit card.
What kind of business information Virre provides for free?
Virre Information Service provides free of charge access to to very scarce data from The Finnish Trade Register in comparison to other national company registers. What is quite rare, the Virre database does not provide information about any people occupying key positions in the company. You can forget about knowing the name of the owner of a Finnish company or the members of the board.
Virre Information Service provides exactly these types of business information from The Finnish Trade Register:
- company name and its auxiliary names
- company number, called in Finland ‘Business ID’ (it takes the following exemplary form 1927402–8)
- legal form
- company business status (active or not)
- company language (Finnish or Swedish)
- registered office (administrative divisions — municipalities of which there are 15 in Finland. The largest are of course Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, Vantaa and Oulu)
- main address and post address
- website
- phone / fax
- company registration date
- incorporation date
- dissolution date and type
- liquidation type
- main type of business activity code and description
- establishment permission date
- company last date of update in The Finnish Trade Register
- information about the company mortgages
Number of companies in Finland, 2020
If you are wondering how many companies there are in Finland today, Virre Information Service PRH is your best source of knowledge. As our Finnish Companies API shows, in 2020, there are almost 547,000 Finnish business entities in The Finnish Trade Register (data from December 2020). Of course, we are talking about legal entities that are registered with an active economic status. There are many more historical entities, i.e. those removed from the business register of Finland, i.e. over 1.2 million.
As in other countries, not only companies are registered in the Finnish Virre. We will also find associations, co-operatives and unions there.
The number of different legal types of companies in Finland in 2020, presents as follows:
- 159,4 thousand private entrepreneurs
- 253,21 thousand limited liability companies (LCC)
- 19,4 thousand limited partnerships (LP)
- 7,2 thousand general partnerships (GP)
- 260 joint-stock companies in Finland (JS)
- 3,2 thousand mutual joint-stock property companies
- 89,7 thousand housing companies
- 1070 branches of a foreign trader.
Types of companies in Finland
Finnish companies take the same legal forms as businesses from the rest of the European Union and the principles of their establishment are also similar. You will quickly find it out when you start regularly searching for information in Virre Information Service PRH.
The simplest legal form for business activity in Finland is a sole proprietorship, known also as private entrepreneurship. Only one person is needed to establish it and there is no obligation to pay company capital. Another form of company that can be found in The Finnish Trade Register is, of course, the limited liability company, which must be established by a legal or natural person and whose initial capital, according to Finnish law, must be at least 2.5 thousand euros. A general partnership must be formed minimum by two individuals and a company form most often chosen by large corporations are joint-stock companies.
Finnish-English dictionary of types of companies in Finland & their legal forms:
- Julkinen osakeyhtiö — joint stock company
- Osakeyhtiö — limited liability company
- Avoin yhtiö — general partnership
- Kommandiittiyhtiö — limited partnership
- Yksityinen elinkeinonharjoittaja — private entrepreneur
- Ulkomaisen elinkeinonharjoittajan sivuliike — branch of a foreign trader
- Eurooppayhtiö — European company
- Valtion liikelaitos — state enterprise
- Yhdistys — association
- Säätiö — foundation
- Muu yhtiö — other enterprise
Finland TOP companies
Although Finland has a population of some 5.5 million, which is not a large number considering the country's geographic size (338,455 km2), it is economically doing well. The standard of living in this country is comparable to that of such rich countries as Germany and Belgium.
It is no wonder then that business in this country is booming. The key sector of the Finnish economy is electronics, manufacturing and forest industry.
The largest and most successful companies from Finland are:
- NOKIA — a Finnish telecommunications and electronics corporation which at one time was the leader in the production of mobile phones in the world
- Sampo Group — a Nordic financial group whose largest shareholders of are Finnish national institutions
- UPM Company — a forest industry company, one of the biggest in the world and the most appreciated because of it’s environmental responsibility. Offers not only timber, paper and plywood, but also energy, biofuels and biochemicals
- Neste — an oil refining company
- Fortum — state-owned clean energy company
- Stora Enso — the renewable materials company (it mainly produces packaging for food, drinks and various types of devices)
- KONE — engineering and service company specializing in production of moving walkways, elevators, automatic doors etc.
Finland’s companies API
Our Finland’s companies API aggregates all information available to the public and openly in Virre Information Service PRH, i.e. provides basic registration data from The Finnish Trade Register directly to the businesses internal systems.
Full documentation of Finland’s companies API you can view HERE and learn more about our KYC/AML data solutions on our company webiste.
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