This is my table:
id | fk_company ------------------- 1 | 2 2 | 2 3 | 2 4 | 4 5 | 4 6 | 11
You can also achieve that by counting the number of commas (or whatever's your separator) in the GROUP_CONCAT:
SELECT (LENGTH(GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT fk_company))-LENGTH(REPLACE(GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT fk_company), ',', ''))) FROM `table` GROUP BY fk_company