There are likely to be 900,000 by the end of this year, said Nguyen Bich Lam, head of the General Statistics Office (GSO).

The number of startups fell by nearly 20 percent year-on-year in the first four months, he said at the release of the White Book on Vietnam businesses on Tuesday.

In the first quarter the number of companies suspending business was 18,600, while the number of newbies rose by 4.4 percent to 29,700, GSO data shows.

In the event, meeting the one-million target would be challenging, Lam said.

The government had set the target in 2016, but experts have been warning it could be too stiff to achieve due to the rising number of businesses that have been shutting shop in recent years.

But Lam said the number of companies is only one aspect and other factors that need to be taken into account are the quality of businesses and their technology use.

Vietnam had 758,600 companies at the end of last year, up 6.1 percent from 2018 year. according to the White Book. Of these, 67 percent were in the service sector, followed by industry-construction (32 percent) and agriculture-forestry-seafood (1 percent).

The majority of them, 94 percent, were small and micro businesses.

But 73 percent of business revenues went to large corporations, which only accounted for 2.8 percent of the total number.