What is “SE”?
SE stands for Europäische Aktiengesellschaft (German), a public limited liability company used primarily in Argentina, Austria, Germany. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is eligible for public listing.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Europäische Aktiengesellschaft, a German-language term. It translates literally as “European joint-stock company.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as eurooppayhtiö, europaische ag, europaische aktiengesellschaft, europaische ges.
Where it's used
SE appears in company names registered in the following 8 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to SE in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “SE” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SE” 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 SE", "country": "ar"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme se",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"se"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does SE stand for?
SE stands for Europäische Aktiengesellschaft (German), which translates as "European joint-stock company".
Is a SE public or private?
A SE is a public entity — it can issue shares that are listed and traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a SE?
Owners of a SE have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use SE?
SE is used in Argentina, Austria, Germany, European Union and 4 other countries.
Need to normalize SE at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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