What is “SE*”?
SE* stands for Europäische Aktiengesellschaft (German), a public limited liability company used primarily in 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 se europaische aktiengesellschaft.
Where it's used
SE* 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 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": "de"}'{
"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 Germany.
Need to normalize SE* at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
Try the live normalizer free →