What is “SK”?
SK (Credit union (shinyo kinko)) is a cooperative used primarily in Japan. It signals limited liability and private ownership.
Where it's used
SK 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 SK in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “SK” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SK” 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 SK", "country": "jp"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme sk",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"sk"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does SK mean?
SK means "Credit union (shinyo kinko)".
Is a SK public or private?
A SK is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a SK?
Owners of a SK have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use SK?
SK is used in Japan.
Need to normalize SK at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
Try the live normalizer free →