[locallost]

Correct. Funny enough though, their corporate structure and the name AG means they do have stocks, but they are not traded and 100% privately owned. For some reason I see this often with German companies, e.g. the German railway. Not sure why that is, although for the railway plausible since they are owned by the state that might eventually want to sell parts of it.

[robwwilliams]

Zeiss and Schott are both owned in their entirety by a foundation that is not allowed to sell shares. Most of the dividends go to larger research institutions in southern Germany (about $80 million to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Tübingen, Freiburg, Ulm, Mainz, Jena).

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

I believe the two applicable options to have a company that counts as its own "person" is either AG or GmbH (~= LLC / "limited").

There is also SE which is a EU form for an AG, and various "partnership" forms that involve a partner that's fully liable. Usually, that partner is not an actual person but a "legal person", i.e. another SE or GmbH.

Even if you're not listed on a stock market, you might want to take on investments, e.g. "give me 10 million for 5% of the company" and I assume the latter is much easier with an AG.

[sehansen]

An AG corporation has stocks in order to track who owns how much and also attach different economic and voting rights to different classes of stock. The other way to incorporate a limited-liability company in Germany is the GmbH, which tracks ownership directly in the articles of incorporation, but are in other ways subject to way lower management, disclosure and accounting requirements. So the AG is mostly useful if you want it to be easy to change your ownership structure, if you for instance raise capital from new investors, issue employee shares, change cross-ownership within a conglomerate or go public some day.

Why Carl Zeiss is an AG I don't know. The West German Carl Zeiss was re-formed as a GmbH in 1946, but had changed to an AG by 1973. The East German Carl Zeiss was turned into a GmbH during reunification and then split in two. One part merged into the West German Carl Zeiss AG and the other is now called Jenoptik. Jenoptik was converted into an AG in 1996 and went public in 1998. AFAICT Carl Zeiss has been privately owned by the Carl Zeiss-Stiftung since 1889, except of course for the temporary East German part.

[stefanfisk]

AFAIK that’s how incorporated companies work in Europe.

Here in Sweden we have A LOT of companies own and operated by state and local government and they’re all “aktiebolag” which literally translates to “stock companies”. For smaller businesses you can register as a sole proprietor and some other odd structures if you are a group of people. You’ll often see the same thing for non-profits as well.

[KellyCriterion]

You create a German AG entity to make it easier to onboard new shareholders/offboard old shareholders.

In most entity types, this involves a lot of paperwork while its quite easy within an AG.

AG does not mean necessarily its publicly traded.