What is “ZAO”?

Full meaning & translation

The full form is Закрытое акционерное общество, a Russian-language term. It translates literally as “Closed joint-stock company.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as zakrytaya aktsionernaya kompaniya, zakrytaya aktsionernaya kompaniya * limited, zakrytaya aktsionernaya kompaniya * ltd, zakrytaya aktsionernaya kompaniya s ogranichennoi otvetstvennostyu.

Where it's used

ZAO appears in company names registered in the following 4 jurisdictions:

What it tells you about the company

Equivalent forms around the world

These are the closest structural equivalents to ZAO in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.

Normalizing “ZAO” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — “Acme ZAO” 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 ZAO", "country": "by"}'

{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme zao",
    "legal_type": null,
    "tokens": [
      "acme",
      "zao"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Frequently asked questions