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