What is “CO LTD”?
CO LTD stands for Limited liability company, a private limited liability company used primarily in Switzerland, South Korea. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Limited liability company. It translates literally as “Limited liability company.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as company limited, jusik hoesa, limited, ltd.
Where it's used
CO LTD appears in company names registered in the following 2 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to CO LTD in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “CO LTD” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme CO LTD” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name": "Acme CO LTD", "country": "ch"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme",
"legal_type": "ltd",
"tokens": [
"acme"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does CO LTD stand for?
CO LTD stands for Limited liability company, which translates as "Limited liability company".
Is a CO LTD public or private?
A CO LTD is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a CO LTD?
Owners of a CO LTD have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use CO LTD?
CO LTD is used in Switzerland, South Korea.
Is a CO LTD the same as a LLC?
Functionally comparable — both are private limited liability company forms — but they operate under different national laws with distinct formation, capital, and governance requirements.
Need to normalize CO LTD at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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