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