What is “SC”?
SC stands for Société coopérative (French), a cooperative used primarily in Argentina, Belgium, Dominican Republic. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Société coopérative, a French-language term. It translates literally as “Cooperative society.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as commanditaire vennootschaap, commanditaire vennootschap, cv, persekutuan komanditer.
Where it's used
SC appears in company names registered in the following 9 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to SC in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “SC” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SC” 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 SC", "country": "ar"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme sc",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"sc"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does SC stand for?
SC stands for Société coopérative (French), which translates as "Cooperative society".
Is a SC public or private?
A SC is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a SC?
Owners of a SC have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use SC?
SC is used in Argentina, Belgium, Dominican Republic, Spain and 5 other countries.
Need to normalize SC at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
Try the live normalizer free →