Englishpublic limited liabilitylimited liability

What is “Corp”?

Corp stands for For-Profit Corporation, a public limited liability company used primarily in Japan, South Korea, Philippines. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is eligible for public listing.

Full meaning & translation

The full form is For-Profit Corporation. It translates literally as “For-profit corporation with publicly traded shares.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as corporation, hapja hoesa, kabushiki gaisha, kabushiki kaisha.

Where it's used

Corp appears in company names registered in the following 7 jurisdictions:

JP · JapanKR · South KoreaPH · PhilippinesRU · RussiaSG · SingaporeSY · SyriaUS · United States

What it tells you about the company

LiabilityOwners' liability is limited to their capital contribution. Personal assets are protected.
OwnershipMay issue publicly traded shares listed on a stock exchange.
ComparableBroadly equivalent to AG in Germany, SA in France, KK in Japan.

Equivalent forms around the world

These are the closest structural equivalents to Corp in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.

CountryEquivalent suffix
GermanyAG
FranceSA
JapanKK
FranceAE
GermanyAGKGA
GermanyAKGKA
RussiaAOZT
GermanyCOAG
RussiaGUP
GermanyINVAG
RussiaJSC
GermanyKGA
JapanKH
RussiaOAO
RussiaPAO
United KingdomPLC
GermanyREITAG
GermanySE
GermanySE*
FranceSEM
FranceSICAF
FranceSICAV
FranceSPA
United KingdomULTD

Normalizing “Corp” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — Acme Corp” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:

Request
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Acme Corp", "country": "jp"}'
Response
{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme",
    "legal_type": "corp",
    "tokens": [
      "acme"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Compare Corp with

Frequently asked questions

What does Corp stand for?

Corp stands for For-Profit Corporation, which translates as "For-profit corporation with publicly traded shares".

Is a Corp public or private?

A Corp is a public entity — it can issue shares that are listed and traded on a stock exchange.

What is the liability in a Corp?

Owners of a Corp have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.

Which countries use Corp?

Corp is used in Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Russia and 3 other countries.

Need to normalize Corp at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.

Try the live normalizer free →