What is “SPA”?
SPA stands for Società Per Azioni (Italian), a public limited liability company used primarily in Chile, Algeria, France. The suffix signals that the business has limited liability and is eligible for public listing.
Full meaning & translation
The full form is Società Per Azioni, a Italian-language term. It translates literally as “Company with shares.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as ag, soc * p az, sociedad por acciones, societa * per azioni.
Where it's used
SPA appears in company names registered in the following 5 jurisdictions:
What it tells you about the company
Equivalent forms around the world
These are the closest structural equivalents to SPA in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.
Normalizing “SPA” in your data
When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme SPA” 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 SPA", "country": "cl"}'{
"data": {
"canonical": "acme",
"legal_type": "spa",
"tokens": [
"acme"
]
},
"meta": {
"pipeline": [
"lowercase",
"legal_suffix"
],
"confidence": 0.99
}
}Compare SPA with
Frequently asked questions
What does SPA stand for?
SPA stands for Società Per Azioni (Italian), which translates as "Company with shares".
Is a SPA public or private?
A SPA is a public entity — it can issue shares that are listed and traded on a stock exchange.
What is the liability in a SPA?
Owners of a SPA have limited liability. Their personal assets are protected, and their exposure is capped at the amount they invested.
Which countries use SPA?
SPA is used in Chile, Algeria, France, Italy and 1 other country.
Need to normalize SPA at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.
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