How to Check if a Company Is Registered in Madagascar

Before you pay a supplier, sign with a partner, or invest in a Malagasy business, there is one check worth two minutes of your time: confirming the company is actually registered. A real company in Madagascar is recorded with the Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés (RCS) — the national trade register, known as the RNCS and operated via the EDBM (Economic Development Board of Madagascar). This guide shows you how to verify a company, what a genuine record looks like, and one important quirk of Madagascar's public search you need to know before you start.

Who keeps Madagascar's company register?

Madagascar's official company registrar is the RNCS — Registre National du Commerce et des Sociétés, the national trade and companies register. It is maintained by the courts' RCS offices (the *greffe* of each commercial court) and operated nationally via the EDBM (Economic Development Board of Madagascar), the one-stop shop that handles company formation. Every company, sole trader (*entreprise individuelle*), and other legal person operating legally in Madagascar is assigned an RCS number and recorded there — its existence and registration are matters of public record.

How to search the Madagascar company register

Here is the part most guides get wrong. Madagascar's public RNCS search is not a company-name lookup. You search by the surname of a director or associate, optionally narrowed by the region (greffe) the company was registered in. So the workflow is:

1. Find the surname of a director, manager, or associate of the business (e.g. *Rakoto*, *Rabe*) — this is what the official register actually indexes, not the company name.
2. Optionally note the region / greffe (the commercial court where it was registered, e.g. Antananarivo) to narrow a common surname down.
3. Search it on Fylings — enter the surname and we check the RNCS for matching people and the companies they're attached to.
4. Open the matching result to see the company's registered name, its RCS number, and the source and date the record was checked.
5. No match under that surname? Try a different director's name or confirm the spelling — and treat a business that can give you no verifiable person or number as unverified.

What a Madagascar company record shows

Madagascar's public RNCS data is deliberately lean — it confirms a company exists, what it's called, and ties it to the people behind it, rather than dumping its full file. On Fylings, a Madagascar record typically shows:

• The registered (legal) name — the exact name on the RCS register
• The RCS number — the company's unique registration identifier
• The director or associate whose surname the record is indexed under
• The region / greffe — the commercial court where the company is registered
• The source and date — every record is attributed to the RNCS, with the date it was checked

Reading a Madagascar RCS number

Every registered company carries an RCS number issued by the greffe where it was registered. It's the single most reliable handle on a Malagasy business, because two companies can share a similar name but no two share an RCS number. When a business gives you one:

• Check that the region in the number matches the greffe it claims to be registered in (e.g. a company that trades from Antananarivo but registered elsewhere is worth a question).
• Confirm the number resolves to the same legal name on the certificate or invoice — not just a similar one.
• Cross-check it against the director's surname you searched, so the number, the name, and the person all line up.

Matching the RCS number to the name and the people behind it is the quickest sanity check you can run — and the hardest thing for a fake business to fake.

How to spot a company that isn't registered

Most problems aren't elaborate forgeries — they're businesses that simply never registered, or that can't tie themselves to a verifiable person or number. Watch for:

• No match when you search a named director's surname on the register — the single biggest signal.
• A business that won't name a director or associate, so you have nothing to look up.
• An RCS number that doesn't resolve to the name or people on the document.
• A name suspiciously similar to a well-known company (an extra word or initial).
• Pressure to pay before you've had a chance to verify anything.

Checking directors and ownership in Madagascar

Because the RNCS is indexed by people, it's actually well suited to the question that matters most in due diligence: who stands behind this business? Searching a director's surname on Fylings surfaces the companies that person is attached to and their RCS numbers — useful for mapping relationships before you commit. For an official certified extract, you can request one through the greffe or EDBM, or verify programmatically via the API.