With a public limited company (sociedad anónima), the main objective is generally to gather money from several investors to undertake large projects that could not be done otherwise. To fulfil this mission, capital is divided into shares which are distributed amongst investing shareholders based on the amount of money contributed by each one of them. Thus, the more shares a shareholder has, the greater their weight in the company.
A sociedad anónima (public limited company) (SA) is a kind of commercial company whose capital is divided into shares, where shareholders are not personally liable for the company’s debts. Some kinds of entities must necessarily take on this corporate form (stock listed companies, banks, insurance companies, stock companies and agencies, venture capital companies, limited liability sport companies, etc.), and other companies decide on this corporate form simply because they are more interested in it than in others.
The main differences between public limited companies and private limited companies are:
Save these essential differences, in all other aspects, one might say that both kinds of corporate forms overlap, such that: