general partnershipunlimited liability

What is “SEP”?

SEP (partnership with participation) is a general partnership used primarily in Côte d’Ivoire. It signals unlimited liability and private ownership.

Where it's used

SEP appears in company names registered in the following jurisdiction:

CI · Côte d’Ivoire

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 SEP in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.

CountryEquivalent suffix
GermanyGBHOH
GermanyGBR
United StatesGP
GermanyOHG
GermanyPG
FranceSCI
FranceSNC

Normalizing “SEP” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — Acme SEP” 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 SEP", "country": "ci"}'
Response
{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme sep",
    "legal_type": null,
    "tokens": [
      "acme",
      "sep"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Frequently asked questions

What does SEP mean?

SEP means "partnership with participation".

Is a SEP public or private?

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

What is the liability in a SEP?

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

Which countries use SEP?

SEP is used in Côte d’Ivoire.

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

Try the live normalizer free →