What is “SA”?

Full meaning & translation

The full form is Société anonyme, a French-language term. It translates literally as “Anonymous company.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as ca, compania anonima, naamloze vennootschap, nv.

Where it's used

SA appears in company names registered in the following 33 jurisdictions:

What it tells you about the company

Equivalent forms around the world

These are the closest structural equivalents to SA in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.

Normalizing “SA” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SA” 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 SA", "country": "ad"}'

{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme sa",
    "legal_type": null,
    "tokens": [
      "acme",
      "sa"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Compare SA with

Frequently asked questions