Joint-stock company
The company is managed on behalf of the shareholders by a board of directors, elected at an annual general meeting.
Utilisers, ie customers, clients and other stakeholders, seek products and services, and offer financial funds for this.
The Tang dynasty saw the development of the heben, the earliest form of joint stock company with an active partner and one or two passive investors.
By the Song dynasty this had expanded into the douniu, a large pool of shareholders with management in the hands of jingshang, merchants who operated their businesses using investors' funds, with investor compensation based on profit-sharing, reducing the risk of individual merchants and burdens of interest payment.
Although the dealings it describes are perhaps more complex than those practiced a century earlier, it essentially deals with a kind of investment and division of profits that for sure would have been made in the twelfth if not also the eleventh century: a four-party partnership that collectively made an investment (of 424,000 strings of cash) in a Chinese trading venture to southeast Asia.
Each party's original investment consisted of precious metals like silver and gold and commodities like salt, paper, and monk certificates (and their accruing tax exemption).
While social and family ties may have shaped the circle of potential coinvestors, they affected little, if at all, an investor's eventual share of the profits, or losses.
An early form of joint-stock company was the medieval commenda, although it was usually employed for a single commercial expedition.
[11] Soon afterwards, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued shares that were made tradable on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
The development enhanced the ability of joint-stock companies to attract capital from investors, as they could now easily dispose of their shares.
Joint-stock companies paid out divisions (dividends) to their shareholders by dividing up the profits of the voyage in the proportion of shares held.
[12] However, in general, incorporation was possible by royal charter or private act, and it was limited because of the government's jealous protection of the privileges and advantages thereby granted.
[12] As a result of the rapid expansion of capital-intensive enterprises in the course of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States, many businesses came to be operated as unincorporated associations or extended partnerships, with large numbers of members.
In the case of Hallett v Dowdall, the Court of the Exchequer held that such clauses bound people who have notice of them.
The corporation is also empowered to borrow money, both conventionally and directly to the public, by issuing interest-bearing bonds.
Therefore, shareholders of publicly traded company will each take a much smaller hit to their returns as opposed to those involved with a closely held corporation.
A closely held company is far more likely to stay in a single place that has treated it well even if that means going through hard times.
In larger, publicly traded companies, often after only one bad year, the first area to feel the effects is the workforce with layoffs or worker hours, wages or benefits being cut.
[citation needed] The affairs of publicly traded and closely held corporations are similar in many respects.
is mainly governed by the new Civil Code, enacted in 2002, and the "SA", by Law 6.404, dated December 15, 1976, as amended.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a joint-stock company is called: The specified form of organization means that the company (private or state-owned) is organized on the Bosnian market (Federation of BiH[18] and RS entity[19] level) as a legal entity that has shares (Bosnian/Croatian: dionica or vrijednosni papir; Serbian: akcija or hartija od vrijednosti - Cyrillic: акција or хартија од вриједности) that can be traded in a free market or stock exchanges in the Bosnia and Herzegovina (listed in Sarajevo Stock Exchange[20] or Banja Luka Stock Exchange).
In Bulgaria, a joint-stock company is called a aktsionerno druzhestvo or AD (Bulgarian: акционерно дружество or АД).
When all shares are owned by a single shareholder the company receives the special designation of ednolichno aktsionerno druzhestvo or EAD (Bulgarian: еднолично акционерно дружество or ЕАД).
The Chilean form of joint-stock company is called Sociedad por Acciones (often abbreviated "SpA").
They were created in 2007 by Law N° 20.190,[21] and they are the most recent variety of societary types, as they represent a simplified form of corporation – originally conceived for venture capital companies.
Between 2002 and 2008, the intermediary corporation (中間法人, chūkan hōjin) existed to bridge the gap between for-profit companies and non-governmental and non-profit organizations.
Following the Gorbachev initiated broad spectrum reforms (perestroika), there was introduced a term of khozraschet and permission for organization of public economic entities called cooperatives.
Generically, any business entity that is recognized as distinct from the people who own it (i.e., is not a sole proprietorship or a partnership) is a corporation.
The process is called "incorporation", referring to the abstract concept of clothing the entity with a "veil" of artificial personhood (embodying, or "corporating" it, 'corpus' being the Latin word for 'body').
[citation needed] Companies set up for privacy or asset protection often incorporate in Nevada, which does not require disclosure of share ownership.
