What is “PAO”?
PAO (Public joint-stock company) is a public limited liability company used primarily in Russia. It signals limited liability and potential public listing.
Where it's used
PAO 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 PAO in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “PAO” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme PAO” 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 PAO", "country": "ru"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme pao",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"pao"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does PAO mean?
PAO means "Public joint-stock company".
Is a PAO public or private?
A PAO is a public entity — it can issue shares that are listed and traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a PAO?
Owners of a PAO have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use PAO?
PAO is used in Russia.
Need to normalize PAO at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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