What is “EK”?

Full meaning & translation

The full form is Einzelunternehmen, eingetragener Kaufmann, eingetragene Kauffrau, a German-language term. It translates literally as “sole proprietorship, registered merchant, registered merchant woman.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as e k, e kfm, e kfr, eingetragener kaufmann.

Where it's used

EK appears in company names registered in the following jurisdiction:

What it tells you about the company

Equivalent forms around the world

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

Normalizing “EK” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme EK” 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 EK", "country": "de"}'

{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme ek",
    "legal_type": null,
    "tokens": [
      "acme",
      "ek"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Frequently asked questions