What is “HB”?
HB stands for Handelsbolag (Swedish), a general partnership used primarily in Sweden. The suffix signals that the business has unlimited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Handelsbolag, a Swedish-language term. It translates literally as “Trading partnership.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as handelsbolag, handelsbolaget.
Where it's used
HB 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 HB in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “HB” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme HB” 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 HB", "country": "se"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme hb",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"hb"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does HB stand for?
HB stands for Handelsbolag (Swedish), which translates as "Trading partnership".
Is a HB public or private?
A HB is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a HB?
Members of a HB have unlimited personal liability — they can be held responsible for the entity's debts beyond their initial investment.
Which countries use HB?
HB is used in Sweden.
Need to normalize HB at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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