What is “OHG”?
OHG stands for Offene Handelsgesellschaft (German), a general partnership used primarily in Austria, Switzerland, Germany. The suffix signals that the business has unlimited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Offene Handelsgesellschaft, a German-language term. It translates literally as “Open trading company.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as offene gesellschaft, offene handelsgesellschaft, og, oh.
Where it's used
OHG appears in company names registered in the following 3 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to OHG in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “OHG” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme OHG” 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 OHG", "country": "at"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme ohg",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"ohg"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does OHG stand for?
OHG stands for Offene Handelsgesellschaft (German), which translates as "Open trading company".
Is a OHG public or private?
A OHG is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a OHG?
Members of a OHG have unlimited personal liability — they can be held responsible for the entity's debts beyond their initial investment.
Which countries use OHG?
OHG is used in Austria, Switzerland, Germany.
Need to normalize OHG at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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