What is “SICAV”?
SICAV stands for Société d'investissement à capital variable (French), a public limited liability company used primarily in France, Luxembourg, Morocco. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is eligible for public listing.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Société d'investissement à capital variable, a French-language term. It translates literally as “Investment company with variable capital.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as societe d investissement a capital variable, societe d'investissement a capital variable.
Where it's used
SICAV appears in company names registered in the following 3 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to SICAV in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “SICAV” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SICAV” 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 SICAV", "country": "fr"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme sicav",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"sicav"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does SICAV stand for?
SICAV stands for Société d'investissement à capital variable (French), which translates as "Investment company with variable capital".
Is a SICAV public or private?
A SICAV is a public entity — it can issue shares that are listed and traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a SICAV?
Owners of a SICAV have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use SICAV?
SICAV is used in France, Luxembourg, Morocco.
Need to normalize SICAV at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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