Estonia’s new midterm goal is to have 150,200 e-residents by the end of 2021. The e-residency platform has so far been adopted by 27,000 foreigners – most often from Finland, Russia, and Ukraine.
This year, an average of 1,000 new e-residents have been registered monthly. Estonia has stripped a citizen of the Philippines of e-residency whose status was used to liquidate dozens of Estonian companies.
Executive manager of the program Kaspar Korjus said the new goal was phrased following the realization that Estonia needs e-residents to start a business here. That is why it was sensible to adopt number of companies created as the new benchmark.
Every tenth Estonian e-resident currently starts a company.
The new plan would see e-residents create 2,500 companies in 2018, 5,000 companies in 2019, and 10,000 new companies in 2020. Their current number stands at 2,500 of which 1,550 have been
created this year. If we add up those figures, we should have 20,000 companies of e-residents by late 2020.
“Our journey started anew in a sense. We worked with students from the Estonian Academy of Arts to map the journey of creating companies in Estonia – what people like and what they dislike about it,” Korjus said.
The plan is to create a new global solution that would allow foreign citizens who are e-residents to pay taxes to other countries through Estonia.