Turkish Furniture Index

How to read a Turkish company’s legal name

Every company page here shows the legal name in a fixed monospaced face, because it is the string you check against a document — not a brand, and not something to tidy up. Here is how to read one.

The tail: what kind of company it is

Turkish law recognises five kinds of commercial company. Türk Ticaret Kanunu (Law 6102), article 124: “Ticaret şirketleri; kollektif, komandit, anonim, limited ve kooperatif şirketlerden ibarettir.” Two of them account for nearly every name in this index.

An anonim şirket is defined in article 329 as a company whose capital is fixed and divided into shares, liable for its debts with its own assets alone, its shareholders liable only for the capital they subscribed. A limited şirket, article 573, is founded by one or more real or legal persons under a trade name, with capital made up of the sum of its basic shares. The practical difference for a buyer is small; the useful signal is that both are capital companies, so the firm’s liability stops at the company.

The middle: activity words, not product claims

“SAN. VE TİC.” is the single most common construction in this index — 4,157 of 8,923 names carry both words. It is close to meaningless as a signal. It says the company registered itself to do industry and trade, which is what almost every Turkish operating company registers to do. It does not mean the firm has a factory.

DIŞ TİC. appears on 1,592 names. It is worth noticing, because a foreign-trade company is often exactly that — a trading arm, not a maker.

The trap: a name that lists five trades

Turkish registered names routinely enumerate every activity the company was incorporated for. Read literally, one name in this index commits its holder to marble, food, furniture, durable consumer goods and transport at once. That is not a conglomerate; it is a broadly drafted incorporation, and it is normal.

So: the activity words in a legal name are the widest thing the company may do, not a description of what it does. If you need to know what a firm actually makes, the name will not tell you. Ask for the firm’s product list and its references, or check its company page here for what it states it makes.

Why we keep the name verbatim

Diacritics included, punctuation included, branch suffixes included. The legal name is what appears on an export declaration and on a Kapasite Raporu, so a name we have cleaned up is a name you cannot match. The friendlier display name at the top of each record is derived from it for reading; the legal name underneath is the one to copy.

Source: Türk Ticaret Kanunu no. 6102, articles 124, 329 and 573 — mevzuat.gov.tr. Firm counts from the 8,923 legal names in this index.

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