Paper Island

ACRA companies register

The Roll

every company that ever was

ACRA's register goes back to 1909. It records the day each entity was born and whether it is alive today — but never the day it died. So this is a survival curve, not a death curve.

How many of each year's cohort are still alive

Registrations by year

What the island says it does

ACRA asks every business what it does, and the answer is free text the filer wrote themselves — key duplicating and hardware, selling cooked food in coffeeshop. Ranking those by count says the same thing everywhere, because a registered address in Singapore is mostly a holding company. So each postal sector is scored by lift: its share of a trade against the island's share. What is listed is what a place does unusually, not what everywhere does. Sectors are labelled by the street the register itself uses most often there.

The gap

What the register does not record

Provenance

IndexThe TideThe CeilingThe LedgerThe MinutesAbsences
reading the register…