Phoenixing costs Australia up to $5 billion a year. It's a director-level behaviour — but it leaves company-level fingerprints on the public register. We measured them across all 3.85 million registered companies. No company is named here, and none of these figures alleges wrongdoing by anyone — see the methodology.
Since January 2020, 920 distinct company names show a resurrection signature: one company deregistered, a different company with the same normalised name registered within −3 to +12 months. The raw match was 1,333; we excluded shelf-company renames, trustee/super succession, and generic short names, and we publish the result as a proxy — the residue still contains legitimate restructures. What survives clusters in transport, cleaning, logistics and construction-adjacent services — the sectors regulators consistently name in illegal-phoenixing enforcement.
If a supplier's trading history belongs to a name rather than the ABN in front of you, verify the ABN — the name's history may be one register event from belonging to someone else.
Share of register companies in external administration or strike-off, by registered state. The band is narrow — geography matters at postcode level, not state level.
Highest distressed-company shares among postcodes with ≥2,000 register companies. Registered address ≠ trading address: CBD-fringe leaders are largely registered-agent clusters, which tells you about a company's accountant, not its operations. The more telling rows are the outer-suburban and regional trading postcodes.
| Postcode | Area | Distressed share | Companies affected | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3008 | Docklands VIC | 4.2% vs 1.8% national | 189 | agent-address cluster |
| 2015 | Alexandria NSW | 4.2% vs 1.8% national | 180 | agent-address cluster |
| 2150 | Parramatta NSW | 4.0% vs 1.8% national | 354 | mixed |
| 2161 | Guildford NSW | 3.9% vs 1.8% national | 165 | trading-suburb signal |
| 2142 | Granville NSW | 3.8% vs 1.8% national | 144 | trading-suburb signal |
| 2190 | Bankstown area NSW | 3.8% vs 1.8% national | 178 | trading-suburb signal |
| 3004 | St Kilda Rd VIC | 3.8% vs 1.8% national | 292 | agent-address cluster |
| 3630 | Shepparton VIC | 3.8% vs 1.8% national | 96 | regional signal |
The median company under external administration is 10.2 years old — older than the register median of 7.9. Administration is the endgame of established companies with creditors worth pursuing; young companies exit by quiet strike-off instead. The uncomfortable implication for procurement: supplier age is weaker protection than it feels, and it's the decade-old supplier whose failure will be formal, contested, and expensive — with preference-payment clawback under s588FA reaching back into invoices you already paid.
ASIC company register bulk data (3,854,624 companies) and ABR extract, snapshot 9 July 2026. Name matching uses normalised names (suffixes stripped) across different ACNs; exclusions: ACN-as-name shelf companies, FAMILY/SUPER entities, names under 6 characters, same-ACN reinstatements. No director-level data is used and no finding identifies any company or person. The resurrection figure is a proxy that includes legitimate restructures. Geographic figures reflect registered addresses. Full methodology in the written report — media@gumshoe.au for the data tables.
Every signal in this report — insolvency, strike-off, name history, and 17 more registers — is checked free on any ABN, in seconds.
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