Public Limited Company

A Private Limited Company is not suitable for a big company, where a large amount of capital from third parties is involved.

A Public Limited Company is the legal form designed for such public companies. Apart from named shares, an NV can also issue ‘bearer shares’ that can be listed on the stock exchange. The shares of an NV can be in principle freely transferred. This makes the shares, that are in fact stocks in the company, easy to trade.  It is therefore easy to seek public investment. In the Netherlands there are far more BV's than NV's.

For the differences please see also Private limited company.