Joint-stock company
business entity which is owned by shareholders
A joint-stock company (JSC) is a business entity in which shares of the company's stock can be bought and sold by shareholders. Each shareholder owns company stock in proportion, evidenced by their shares (certificates of ownership). Shareholders are able to transfer their shares to others without any effects to the continued existence of the company.
In modern-day corporate law, the existence of a joint-stock company is often synonymous with incorporation (possession of legal personality separate from shareholders) and limited liability (shareholders are liable for the company's debts only to the value of the money they have invested in the company). Therefore, joint-stock companies are commonly known as corporations or limited companies.
Some jurisdictions still provide the possibility of registering joint-stock companies without limited liability. In the United Kingdom and in other countries that have adopted its model of company law, they are known as unlimited companies.
A joint-stock company is an artificial person; it has legal existence separate from persons composing it. It can sue and can be sued in its own name. It is created by law, established for commercial purposes, and comprises a large number of members.
“Joint-stock company” enters the record as business entity which is owned by shareholders. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Joint-stock, company and business can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Joint-stock company” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Joint-stock, company and business provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q134161. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joint-stock company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.