Setu · an archived project

The registry, annotated

A frozen slice of Singapore's company register, kept for the things in it that are worth pointing at. Not a search tool — the registrar has one, and it is better. It is here because I built a system to tell records like these apart, and the register had never confused them.

A company can outlive several of its names

The oldest company on the register was incorporated in 1887, and it has been called four different things. You can read a century of Singapore's industrial history in the chain, backwards.

A dockyard becomes part of a conglomerate, then part of a larger merger, and the register keeps every step. This is the case that makes former-name resolution look valuable, and it is why Setu carried an index of 101,501 of them. The registrar resolves these itself, which took five minutes to establish and five months to think of checking.

Others never moved at all. Registered four months after the shipyard, and still under the name it started with, 139 years later:

The trap, in one record

This is a Singaporean information-security firm. Trace its names back and it was called CISCO Security Services.

That CISCO is the Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation, a Singaporean guarding company founded in 1958. It has no relationship to the American networking firm of the same name. A matcher scoring names by similarity has no way to know that, and every reason to think it has found something.

The register knows, because it never had to guess. It issued 199205045W once and has been pointing at the same company ever since, through ten names.

Fourteen names

The record for name changes belongs to a sole proprietorship registered in 2006, which has been fourteen different businesses without ever ceasing to be one entity.

A different kind of drift, from 1977. An air freight company that is now a bubble tea shop, with a stop at a kung fu tea and arts centre along the way.

Twenty-five entities carry seven former names, and one carries fourteen. The distribution has a long, strange tail, and none of it is ambiguity. Every one of these is a single company that the registrar has never once lost track of.

What the snapshot held

617,987 live companies and 101,501 former names, across 1,021 industry classifications, incorporated between 1887 and June 2026.

That entity count is an upper bound rather than a measurement. The ingest added and updated records but never removed them, so a company struck off after its letter was last synced is still counted here. The figures describe what was captured between 14 and 31 July 2026, and nothing on this page has changed since.