Share of the Banque de Montreux, issued 20 November 1900. Sociétés anonymes were common in Switzerland at this time.
The abbreviation S.A. or SA, for the French société anonyme[a] designates a type of limited company in certain countries, most of which have a Romance language as their official language and operates a derivative of the 1804, Napoleonic, civil law.[1] Originally, shareholders could be anonymous and collect dividends by surrendering coupons attached to their share certificates. Dividends were paid to whomever held the certificate. Since share certificates could be transferred privately, corporate management would not necessarily know who owned its shares – nor did anyone but the holders.
As with bearer bonds, anonymous unregistered share ownership and dividend collection enabled money laundering, tax evasion, and concealed business transactions in general, so governments passed laws to audit the practice. Nowadays, shareholders of S.A.s are not anonymous, though shares can still be held by a holding company to obscure the beneficiary.
Sociedad Anónima or Sociedad por Acciones in Spanish
Mexican law also takes into account the variability of the corporate stock, resulting in most S.A. turning into Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable (S.A. de C.V.), or Sociedad Anónima Bursátil de Capital Variable (S.A.B. de C.V.) for publicly traded companies.
Mexico also has Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada de Capital Variable (S. de R.L. de C.V.), which is analogous to the limited liability company.
شركة مساهمة عامة ذات مسؤولية محدودة ش.ذ.م.م, Sharikah musāhamah ʿāmmah dhāt mas'ūliyyah maḥdūdah (lit.'Public share company with limited liability') in Arabic
Акціонерне товариство, Aktsionerne tovarystvo (AT) in Ukrainian
Publicly traded company ("public company") or Incorporated (Inc.) in the United States, though the former term does not appear in the names of business entities
^"26 CFR 301.7701-2 – Business entities; definitions. | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute". Legal Information Institute. (v)Multilingual countries. Different linguistic renderings of the name of an entity listed in paragraph (b)(8)(i) of this section shall be disregarded. For example, an entity formed under the laws of Switzerland as a Societe Anonyme will be a corporation and treated in the same manner as an Aktiengesellschaft.
