What is “FOB”?
FOB (family owned business) is a private limited liability company used primarily in India. It signals limited liability and private ownership.
Where it's used
FOB 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 FOB in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “FOB” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme FOB” 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 FOB", "country": "in"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme fob",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"fob"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does FOB mean?
FOB means "family owned business".
Is a FOB public or private?
A FOB is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a FOB?
Owners of a FOB have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use FOB?
FOB is used in India.
Is a FOB 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 FOB at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
Try the live normalizer free →