Estonian companies API: Meet Business Register of Estonia
Key Estonian companies information: what data you can find in the commercial register of Estonia e-Äriregister, information about paid services like for example annual reports, useful guide on legal forms and total number of businesses in Estonia 2020.
Ahead of you is the next part of our educational cycle about the commercial registers of European countries, from which data is delivered directly to the systems by our company information APIs. If you are interested in data not only about Estonian companies, see our previous articles: Finland, Norway, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia.
Meet Business Register of Estonia: e-Äriregister
Online Estonian Business Register is called e-Äriregister and it’s maintained by the Estonian Centre of Registers and Information Systems RIK. e-Äriregister is an electronic database that retrieves real-time data directly from several smaller Estonian commercial registers and from courts and that’s why it includes all companies registered in this Baltic country, as well as non-profit organizations, entrepreneurs and economic entities run by the state treasury.
The official website of the e-Äriregister is here: e-Business Register of Estonia. The database is available in English.
This central commercial register of Estonia provides some basic data for free, but to see more detailed information you should become a so-called “contractual user”.
What do you have to pay extra for and what not?
- For free and without logging in, you can search for a company by its VAT number or registry code and obtain basic information from registry card (in the next paragraph, we will describe this data range in detail)
- For an additional fee, you have access to unlimited information about Estonian companies. For example, general information from the e-commercial register of Estonia costs 1 EUR, personal data 2 EUR, general and commercial pledge information 2 EUR, annual reports 2 EUR, beneficial owner information 1 EUR.
If you become a contract user of the Estonian Centre of Registers and Information Systems RIK, you will also get access to relations between various companies and persons and bonus access to e-land register. You will also be able to search for companies in the database by persons, fields of activity and company location.
What kind of business information Estonian e-Business Register provides free of charge?
It can be said that the Estonian Business Register gives us a lot on the one hand, and little on the other. In the e-Äriregister, we can easily find the most important registration numbers of Estonian companies, information about restrictions, address or taxes, but similarly to e.g. the commercial register of Finnish companies, the commercial register of Estonia do not allow us to find out who is the owner of the company or the shareholder. We will not learn any, even basic data from the financial statements.
Open & free company data scope from Estonian e-Business Register looks like this:
- company number
- company full name
- registration date
- VAT number (in Estonia it is called also KMKR number)
- VAT number history (registration code, dates, previous KMKR numbers)
- legal form
- share capital
- company business status
- EMTAK code (EMTAK is the Estonian version of NACE classification of economic activities)
- NACE code
- field of business activity description
- full address
- phone number
- company website
- information as to whether the economic entity accepts e-invoices
- tax debt information
- information on annual reports that are available in e-Business Register of Estonia for extra charge (their dates of submission)
- card registry number and its type
- type of regulation
- court orders (type of regulation, number, release date)
- business restrictions information (for example Ärikeeld, which means prohibition of business; the dates when the prohibition applies).
How many companies are currently in Estonia? 2020
According to e-Business Register, e-Äriregister, there are currently over 392,7 thousand legal entities in Estonia (data from December 2020). 256.7 thousand of them are economic entities that appear in the register as active.
The monitoring of our Estonian companies API shows that each month approximately 770 new companies are opened in Estonia.
It might not seem like much, but let us remind you that Estonia is one of the smallest countries in Europe. Its population is only 1.3 million people, of which Estonians constitute only less than 67%. The rest are Russians.
If you are wondering how many companies of different types were in Estonia December 2020, have a look here:
- 179,7 thousand private limited companies
- 2,5 thousand joint stock companies
- 1,3 thousand general partnerships
- 26,5 thousand the self-employed persons (sole proprietors)
- 514 branches of foreign companies
- 10 European companies
- 1,5 thousand commercial associations (co-operatives).
Legal forms of Estonian companies
The legal forms of Estonian companies do not differ much from those found in other European countries. In Estonian Business Register we can find here both sole proprietorships and joint-stock companies, limited liability companies and limited partnerships.
The principles of establishing and existence of these companies are as follows:
- Limited partnership (Usaldusühing (UÜ)) — no obligation for minimum company capital; two or more people act under a common company name and at least one of them is responsible for the UÜ liabilities with all its property
- Joint stock companies (Aktsiaselts (AS)) — the minimum share capital is 400 000EEK,
- Private limited companies (Osaühing (OÜ)) — the minimum share capital is 40 000EEK.
A handy dictionary of the different legal types of Estonian companies
- Aktsiaselts (AS) — joint-stock company
- Osaühing (OÜ) — private limited company
- Usaldusühing (UÜ) — limited partnership
- Täisühing — general partnership
- Tulundusühistu — co-operative
- Füüsilisest isikust ettevõtja — the self-employed person (sole proprietorship)
- Sihtasutus — foundation
- Välismaa äriühingu filiaal — branch of a foreign company
- Euroopa äriühing — societas europaea
- Mittetulundusühing — non-profit organisation
- Kohaliku omavalitsuse asutus — Local government agency
- Täidesaatva riigivõimu asutus või riigi muu institutsioon — executive agency or other public institution
Estonian companies API
As a data provider belonging to, among others to FEBIS (international Federation of Business Information Service), we rely only on data from verified public sources.
Our Estonian companies API aggregates information directly from Estonian e-Business Register, e-Äriregister. The data we collect is the information that we mentioned in the previous paragraph as that the registry makes available for free, at no additional charge. Therefore, these are basic registry data that can be useful during various types of due diligence processes.
If you want to see the Estonian companies API documentation, you can find it HERE. If you want to test this solution, just write to us.
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