What is “SNC”?
SNC stands for Società In Nome Collettivo (Italian), a general partnership used primarily in Angola, Belgium, Brazil. The suffix signals that the business has unlimited liability and is privately held.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Società In Nome Collettivo, a Italian-language term. It translates literally as “Company in collective name.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as offene handelsgesellschaft, offene handelsgesellschaft snc, ohg, snc ohg.
Where it's used
SNC appears in company names registered in the following 12 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to SNC in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “SNC” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SNC” 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 SNC", "country": "ao"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme snc",
"legal_type": null,
"tokens": [
"acme",
"snc"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Frequently asked questions
What does SNC stand for?
SNC stands for Società In Nome Collettivo (Italian), which translates as "Company in collective name".
Is a SNC public or private?
A SNC is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a SNC?
Members of a SNC have unlimited personal liability — they can be held responsible for the entity's debts beyond their initial investment.
Which countries use SNC?
SNC is used in Angola, Belgium, Brazil, Switzerland and 8 other countries.
Need to normalize SNC at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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