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