Frenchgeneral partnershipunlimited liability

What is “SCI”?

SCI stands for Société civile (French), a general partnership used primarily in Argentina, France, Luxembourg. The suffix signals that the business has unlimited liability and is privately held.

Full meaning & translation

The full form is Société civile, a French-language term. It translates literally as “Civil society or civil partnership.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as s de ci, sociedad de capital e industria, societe civile, societe civile immobiliere.

Where it's used

SCI appears in company names registered in the following 4 jurisdictions:

AR · ArgentinaFR · FranceLU · LuxembourgUY · Uruguay

What it tells you about the company

LiabilityMembers have unlimited personal liability for the entity's obligations.
OwnershipPrivately held. Shares are not listed or traded on a public exchange.
ComparableBroadly equivalent to GBHOH in Germany, GBR in Germany, GP in United States.

Equivalent forms around the world

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

CountryEquivalent suffix
GermanyGBHOH
GermanyGBR
United StatesGP
GermanyOHG
GermanyPG
LuxembourgSENC
FranceSNC

Normalizing “SCI” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — Acme SCI” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:

Request
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Acme SCI", "country": "ar"}'
Response
{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme sci",
    "legal_type": null,
    "tokens": [
      "acme",
      "sci"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Frequently asked questions

What does SCI stand for?

SCI stands for Société civile (French), which translates as "Civil society or civil partnership".

Is a SCI public or private?

A SCI is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.

What is the liability in a SCI?

Members of a SCI have unlimited personal liability — they can be held responsible for the entity's debts beyond their initial investment.

Which countries use SCI?

SCI is used in Argentina, France, Luxembourg, Uruguay.

Need to normalize SCI at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.

Try the live normalizer free →