The Form F-2 Files dataset is a closed historical archive of Form F-2 and Form F-2/A registration statements filed on EDGAR by foreign private issuers (FPIs) electing short-form Securities Act registration. Each record is a single complete EDGAR submission — the registration statement, every non-image exhibit, and a structured metadata.json manifest — packaged as a folder inside a monthly ZIP container. The form was codified at 17 CFR 239.32 and was eliminated by the SEC effective December 1, 2005 under Release No. 33-8591 (Securities Offering Reform), so the dataset spans the operative life of the form on EDGAR from May 1996 through November 2005 and will not grow. Filings are distributed in their native HTML or TXT formats, each preserving the original EDGAR SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope, alongside the JSON manifest that encodes the EDGAR header.
Programmatically retrieve the full list of dataset archive files, download URLs and dataset metadata.
Dataset Index JSON API
Download the entire dataset as a single archive file.
Download Entire Dataset:
Download a single container file (e.g. monthly archive) from the dataset.
Download Single Container:
The dataset captures every EDGAR submission of Form F-2 (initial filings) and Form F-2/A (pre- and post-effective amendments) over the form's full operative period. Form F-2 was a short-form Securities Act of 1933 registration statement, available exclusively to foreign private issuers that already had an established Exchange Act reporting history with the SEC. It was the foreign-issuer analogue of Form S-2 for domestic registrants. Eligible filers could satisfy substantial portions of the Securities Act disclosure obligations by incorporating their existing Exchange Act periodic filings — most importantly the annual report on Form 20-F and intervening Form 6-Ks — by reference, rather than restating the full body of issuer-level information inside the registration statement itself. The form was used to register debt securities, equity securities, and other foreign-issuer offerings.
The SEC eliminated Form F-2 effective December 1, 2005, as part of the Securities Offering Reform package adopted under Release No. 33-8591, which redistributed registration eligibility and disclosure mechanics across the revised Form F-1 and Form F-3 framework. The dataset therefore covers the operative life of the form on EDGAR, from May 1996 through November 2005, and includes both initial filings (F-2) and pre- and post-effective amendments (F-2/A).
Records are delivered inside monthly ZIP containers under a YYYY/YYYY-MM.zip path scheme; inside each ZIP, every accession occupies one folder whose name is the eighteen-digit accession number with the two dash separators removed (for example, accession 0001062993-05-000171 becomes folder 000106299305000171). The on-disk file types are JSON for the manifest, HTML for the primary form document and most exhibits in later-period filings, and TXT for plain-text submissions and exhibits in earlier-period filings.
One record in the Form F-2 Files dataset is a single complete EDGAR submission of a Form F-2 or Form F-2/A registration statement, materialized as a folder of files keyed by its accession number. Each record bundles the primary registration statement document, every non-image exhibit and ancillary document filed in the same submission, and a structured metadata.json manifest that captures the EDGAR header for that accession. The unit of analysis is the full registration statement filing, not an individual exhibit, prospectus section, or cover page.
Each record folder always contains a metadata.json manifest plus the original EDGAR submission documents in their native file types, with image attachments (typically EDGAR GRAPHIC documents such as JPEG and GIF) excluded by design. The complete-submission .txt aggregator that EDGAR generates for every accession is referenced from the manifest but is not materialized on disk, since its content is fully reconstructible from the individual document files.
The HTML and TXT documents are not standalone web or text files. Each one retains the EDGAR SGML envelope that EDGAR assigns at acceptance: a <DOCUMENT> wrapper that opens with <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>, and <TEXT> header lines, contains the actual document body (an <html> document or a block of ASCII text), and closes with </TEXT></DOCUMENT>. The five header tags carry the same identifying values as the matching documentFormatFiles[] entry in the manifest, so metadata and document body can be joined without reparsing the body. Earlier-era filings, particularly those from 1996 through the late 1990s, often consist entirely of plain ASCII inside this envelope, with tabular content rendered using fixed-width spacing.
metadata.json is the canonical join key for the record and the primary source of structured submission metadata. It encodes the EDGAR header that originally accompanied the submission and the inventory of constituent documents.
Top-level fields include:
formType — the literal F-2 or F-2/A value.accessionNo — the dashed eighteen-character accession identifier.filedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp with timezone offset reflecting EDGAR's eastern-time acceptance clock.description — a short human-readable line such as Form F-2 - Registration statement for certain foreign private issuers.linkToFilingDetails — URL to the primary document on sec.gov/Archives/edgar.linkToTxt — URL to the complete-submission .txt aggregator.linkToHtml — URL to the EDGAR -index.htm landing page for the accession.linkToXbrl — present in the schema but empty for F-2 records.id — opaque thirty-two-character hexadecimal hash providing a stable internal record identifier.documentFormatFiles[] — array of constituent-document descriptors (see below).entities[] — array of filer/co-registrant objects (see below).dataFiles[] — present in the schema but empty for F-2 records.documentFormatFiles[] enumerates every constituent document of the original EDGAR submission, including documents that are referenced but intentionally not materialized on disk (graphics and the full-submission text aggregator). Each entry carries:
sequence — numeric ordering string for individual documents; blank for the full-submission aggregate.size — byte count as a string.documentUrl — absolute URL of the form sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/<cik>/<accession-no-dashes>/<filename>.description — human-readable description line.type — EDGAR document-type code (e.g. F-2 for the primary, EX-5.1 for a legality opinion, EX-23.2 for an auditor consent, GRAPHIC for an image).entities[] carries one object per filer or co-registrant on the submission, and is plural by design to accommodate co-filers, guarantors, or jointly filing affiliates. Each entity object contains:
companyName — registrant name with an EDGAR role suffix such as (Filer).cik — zero-padded ten-digit Central Index Key.irsNo — IRS employer identification number, frequently 000000000 for foreign issuers without a US tax identifier.fileNo — the SEC-assigned 333-series Securities Act file number under which the registration statement is processed.fiscalYearEnd — MMDD form.act — statute under which the filing is made (33 for the Securities Act, which applies to F-2).type — the entity's form-type association.sic — Standard Industrial Classification code with English description.filmNo — EDGAR film number for the submission.The primary document — the F-2 itself, typically named formf2.htm or a similar variant and tagged with SGML <TYPE>F-2 — is the registration statement and its embedded statutory prospectus. Although Form F-2 is a short-form filing, the prospectus body follows the conventional Securities Act registration statement order.
Facing page. Identifies the registrant, the state or jurisdiction of incorporation (frequently a Canadian province, an EU member state, or another non-US jurisdiction), the IRS employer identification number when one exists, the SIC code, the registrant's principal executive office address, the agent for service of process in the United States, and the proposed Securities Act file number.
Calculation of registration fee table. Lists each title of securities to be registered, the amount being registered, the proposed maximum offering price per unit, the proposed maximum aggregate offering price, and the registration fee payable, computed under Securities Act Rule 457.
Prospectus body. Carries the substantive disclosures: a description of the offering and the securities; risk factors; use of proceeds; capitalization; description of the registrant's business and properties; selected financial information; management's discussion and analysis (or its incorporation by reference to the most recent Form 20-F); description of capital stock or debt securities being offered; plan of distribution; legal matters; experts; and where appropriate, taxation discussion (including home-country and US federal tax considerations relevant to foreign private issuer offerings). Because Form F-2 is a short-form registration, large portions of the issuer-level disclosure — audited financial statements, the full business description, MD&A, and prior-period operating data — are typically incorporated by reference from the registrant's most recent Form 20-F annual report and any intervening Forms 6-K rather than restated in the prospectus.
Part II (information not required in prospectus). Contains the registration statement undertakings, a list of exhibits, indemnification provisions, and recent sales of unregistered securities where applicable.
Signatures. The registrant, its principal executive officer, principal financial officer, principal accounting officer, a majority of the board of directors, and the authorized representative in the United States each sign. The authorized-US-representative signature is a foreign-issuer-specific requirement.
Exhibits follow the registration statement and are organized under the Item 601 of Regulation S-K exhibit-numbering scheme as adapted for foreign private issuers. Each exhibit appears as a separate document in the EDGAR submission, with its own SGML wrapper carrying the appropriate EX--prefixed type code. Exhibits commonly present in F-2 filings include:
Each exhibit document is enumerated as its own entry in documentFormatFiles[], with its type code, sequence, filename, byte size, and human-readable description. Image attachments referenced inside HTML exhibits — for example, an auditor logo on a consent letter — are listed in the manifest with type GRAPHIC but are not materialized inside the ZIP.
A record contains, on disk, the metadata.json manifest and every non-image document from the original EDGAR submission in its native HTML or TXT form, each preserving the SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope. Excluded from the materialized files are:
GRAPHIC types), which remain enumerated in documentFormatFiles[] for completeness but are not bundled..txt aggregator, which is referenced via linkToTxt and listed in documentFormatFiles[] but is not bundled because its content is reconstructible from the individual document files.A Form F-2/A record has the same container shape and the same metadata.json schema as an initial F-2 filing, with formType set to F-2/A and the SGML primary <TYPE> set accordingly. Structurally, however, an amendment is rarely a clean restatement of the prospectus; it is the amendment as filed.
Pre-effective amendments often consist of a complete, marked-up prospectus reflecting comment-letter changes from the SEC staff review, in which case the document inventory closely resembles the initial filing's. Other amendments are narrow — for example, filing a missing legal opinion, replacing a previously filed exhibit, restating the calculation-of-fee table after a Rule 457 fee adjustment, or adding a delaying-amendment cover page — and the document inventory may then be limited to a cover page plus one or two added or replaced exhibits.
The fileNo field in entities[] is the same 333-series Securities Act file number as the initial filing, providing the linkage between the original F-2 and any subsequent F-2/A submissions on the same registration statement, while accessionNo and filedAt distinguish each amendment as a separate EDGAR submission and therefore a separate dataset record.
Across the dataset's 1996–2005 span, the on-disk format of an F-2 record evolves in step with the broader EDGAR transition from text-only to HTML-bodied filings. Filings from 1996 and the late 1990s are predominantly plain ASCII inside the SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope: the prospectus, calculation-of-fee table, and exhibits all appear as line-wrapped text, with tabular content rendered using fixed-width spacing. EDGAR began accepting HTML-formatted documents in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s the typical F-2 filing is HTML-bodied — the SGML envelope still wraps each document, but the <TEXT> block now contains a full <html> document with structural tags, inline styling, and embedded references to image files for logos, signatures, and graphical elements. By 2004–2005, immediately before the form's elimination, HTML is the dominant body format and image references inside HTML exhibits are common, although the images themselves are excluded from the dataset.
The substantive disclosure framework of Form F-2 was relatively stable across its operative period, but two regulatory shifts affect record content in later years. First, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 introduced certification and internal-control disclosure obligations that flow into the Exchange Act filings incorporated by reference into the F-2 prospectus, and signature pages and exhibit lists in post-2002 F-2 filings frequently reflect related additions. Second, SEC rulemaking on risk-factor disclosure and on Form 20-F content (notably the 1999 changes that aligned Form 20-F more closely with Form 10-Ks and Form 10-Qs, and subsequent refinements in the early 2000s) reshapes the universe of information that an F-2 incorporates by reference, even though the F-2 form itself was not the locus of those changes. The complete elimination of the form on December 1, 2005, under Release No. 33-8591 means there are no records dated after that effective date.
Several characteristics of the record shape matter for downstream extraction and analysis:
<DOCUMENT>, <TYPE>, <SEQUENCE>, <FILENAME>, <DESCRIPTION>, and <TEXT> header lines, together with the trailing </TEXT></DOCUMENT> pair, must be stripped before feeding the body to an HTML or text parser.documentFormatFiles[] is authoritative for the original EDGAR submission but is broader than the on-disk file set, since it lists graphics and the full-submission .txt aggregator that are intentionally not materialized. Joining manifest entries to files on disk requires filtering out the GRAPHIC entries and the blank-sequence aggregate.entities[] is plural by design and may contain multiple co-filers in cases involving guarantors or affiliated foreign issuers, even though many F-2 filings have a single Filer.irsNo is commonly 000000000 where no US tax identifier exists, and SIC codes and addresses reflect non-US operations. The signature page additionally carries a US authorized representative, which is a foreign-issuer-specific requirement.fileNo rather than by accession number, since each amendment receives its own accession.The registrant on every Form F-2 or F-2/A is a foreign private issuer (FPI) electing short-form Securities Act registration. The form was not available to U.S. domestic registrants (who used Form S-2), foreign governments, investment companies, asset-backed issuers, or business development companies.
The filer must qualify as an FPI under Securities Act Rule 405 and Exchange Act Rule 3b-4. A non-U.S. issuer fails the test if more than 50% of its outstanding voting securities are held of record by U.S. residents and any of the following also applies: a majority of its executive officers or directors are U.S. citizens or residents, more than 50% of its assets are located in the U.S., or its business is principally administered in the U.S. Loss of FPI status forces migration to domestic forms (Form S-1/S-2/Form S-3, 10-K, 10-Q, Form 8-K).
To file Form F-2, the FPI had to satisfy both a reporting-history test and a transactional eligibility test:
FPIs that failed the reporting-history or transactional floor used long-form Form F-1. FPIs that met stricter conditions could use Form F-3, which additionally permitted forward incorporation by reference and shelf registration under Rule 415.
The filing party on the cover is always the issuer, even in secondary offerings; selling shareholders, underwriters, and guarantors are described inside the prospectus but are not the EDGAR registrant.
Form F-2 filings are transactional, not periodic. A record arises only when an eligible FPI commences a registered Securities Act offering and elects short-form F-2 registration. There is no calendar deadline; timing is at the issuer's discretion.
Typical triggering transactions include primary debt or equity offerings, secondary resales, exchange offers, conversions, and dividend or interest reinvestment plan registrations.
A Form F-2/A is filed to amend a previously filed F-2:
Each amendment is a separate EDGAR submission and produces its own dataset record.
EDGAR coverage begins May 1996, when mandatory electronic filing was phased in for most registrants. The dataset closes on December 1, 2005, when Form F-2 was eliminated by the SEC's Securities Offering Reform in Release No. 33-8591. That release rescinded Forms F-2 and S-2 as no longer necessary, expanded short-form eligibility on Form F-3, introduced the well-known seasoned issuer (WKSI) category and automatic shelf registration, and modernized free writing prospectus and communication safe harbors. After December 1, 2005, former F-2 filers migrated to Form F-3 (if seasoned-issuer eligible) or Form F-1 (if not). No F-2 or F-2/A submissions exist after that date; the dataset is a closed historical corpus.
Form F-2 sat in the middle tier of Securities Act registration forms for foreign private issuers, between the long-form F-1 and the short-form F-3. Its closest neighbors are the other F-series registration forms, the domestic S-series analogs, the Exchange Act reports it incorporated by reference (20-F and 6-K), and the Rule 424 prospectuses delivered after effectiveness. Because Securities Offering Reform (Release No. 33-8591) eliminated F-2 effective December 1, 2005, several comparisons also turn on what absorbed its role.
S-2 was the structural twin of F-2 for domestic issuers: a middle-tier Securities Act registration that allowed seasoned but non-S-3-eligible filers to incorporate Exchange Act reports by reference. The mechanics were near-identical; the divide is filer population and incorporated reports — S-2 pulled from 10-K and 10-Q, F-2 from 20-F and 6-K. Both were eliminated by the same 2005 release. An S-2 dataset is the closest non-overlapping cousin to this one.
F-1 is the baseline FPI registration statement, used by FPI IPOs and seasoned FPIs that fail F-2/F-3 eligibility. Unlike F-2, it requires full disclosure inside the registration statement with limited reliance on incorporation by reference, producing longer, more narrative-heavy filings with in-document financials and business descriptions. F-1 remains active today; F-2 does not.
F-3 sat one tier above F-2, requiring a longer reporting history plus a public float threshold (historically $75 million non-affiliate equity float). The key mechanical difference: F-3 permits forward incorporation by reference of post-effective Exchange Act filings, while F-2 generally permitted only backward incorporation of already-filed reports. After 2005, expanded F-3 eligibility and the new WKSI category absorbed F-2's middle-tier role, which is why F-2 was retired rather than retained alongside F-3.
F-4 registers FPI securities issued in mergers, exchange offers, and reclassifications. Overlap with F-2 is limited to issuer population: F-4 is transaction-driven and contains target company disclosure, merger agreements, fairness opinions, and pro forma financials, whereas F-2 covered ordinary cash offerings by seasoned FPIs.
These are jurisdiction- or transaction-specific FPI forms and should not be conflated with F-2:
F-7/F-8/F-10/F-80 are all Multijurisdictional Disclosure System forms that permit reliance on Canadian home-country disclosure. F-2 was a general-purpose Securities Act form open to FPIs of any jurisdiction meeting its seasoned-issuer criteria and was not part of MJDS.
20-F is the FPI annual report under the Exchange Act, analogous to a domestic 10-K, and was the principal document F-2 filings incorporated by reference. The two are complementary, not substitutable: 20-F supplies audited financials, operating and financial review, and business description; F-2 wraps that prior disclosure into an offering vehicle. Reconstructing the full disclosure package an F-2 investor saw generally requires both this dataset and the issuer's contemporaneous 20-F.
6-K furnishes material information FPIs make public in their home jurisdiction — press releases, interim financials, board changes — and was routinely incorporated by reference to update F-2 prospectuses between annual reports. 6-K is "furnished" rather than "filed," is high-frequency and event-driven, and roughly combines the role of a domestic 8-K with quarterly disclosures. F-2 references 6-K content; it does not contain it.
424 filings — principally Rule 424(b)(1)–(b)(5) and 424(a) — are the prospectuses actually delivered to investors after effectiveness, including pricing supplements and shelf takedowns. F-2 (and F-2/A) is the registration vehicle filed for SEC review; the 424 is the marketing and pricing document. Final pricing, exact share counts, named underwriters, and detailed use of proceeds typically live in the 424 rather than in the F-2 itself. The two are sequential within a single offering, not interchangeable.
The Form F-2 Files dataset is bounded by four concrete distinctions:
Adjacent datasets — particularly 20-F, 6-K, and 424 — complement F-2 within a single offering's disclosure chain, but none substitute for the registration-statement-as-filed content this dataset preserves.
Because the dataset is a closed historical archive of FPI short-form registration statements filed between May 1996 and December 2005, it does not support live deal monitoring. It serves a defined set of retrospective users working on the pre-2005 short-form registration record.
Used as a primary-source archive of how short-form registration was practiced before its elimination. Relevant fields: cover pages, eligibility statements, incorporation-by-reference clauses pointing to Form 20-F, and risk-factor and use-of-proceeds structure. Supports comparative work on how F-2 conventions migrated into F-3 and F-4, citations in expert reports, and internal training material on legacy registration mechanics.
Used as a bounded empirical corpus for the decade leading up to Securities Offering Reform. Researchers focus on issuer jurisdiction and industry, securities type, offering size, underwriting structure in exhibits, and the depth of incorporation by reference. The fixed 1996–2005 window makes the dataset well suited to before/after analyses of the 2005 reform and to studies of how reporting-history thresholds shaped FPI offering frequency.
Used to reconstruct how the agency administered short-form registration for FPIs. Of interest: filing-date sequences, F-2/A amendment patterns (a proxy for staff comments), the mix of qualifying registrants, and exhibits identifying underwriters and counsel. Supports retrospective regulatory analyses and empirical assessments of the rationales in Release No. 33-8591.
Used to close a specific gap in EDGAR corpora: a discontinued form that live ingestion pipelines tuned to current form types are unlikely to capture. Relevant outputs: per-accession metadata (filer IDs, dates, accession numbers, document inventory), preserved TXT/HTML document sets, and consistent F-2 vs F-2/A handling. Supports historical backfills and complete cross-form timelines for FPIs that moved between F-1, F-2, F-3, and F-4.
Used to backfill historical league tables and FPI deal records. Focus is on cover-page deal economics, underwriting agreement exhibits, descriptions of securities, and capitalization tables. Supports corrected attribution of underwriter and counsel roles across the late-1990s and early-2000s FPI market and jurisdiction-level activity prior to 2005.
Used as a targeted slice within a broader SEC filings corpus. Value lies in the stylistic features of pre-Reform F-2 prospectuses: incorporation-by-reference language, FPI-specific risk factors, descriptions of foreign legal and tax regimes, and exhibit conventions distinct from domestic S-series forms. Practical uses: corpus diversification, fine-tuning on summarization or section classification, and benchmarking retrieval over discontinued form types. Useful as a labeled subset rather than a standalone corpus.
Used by analysts producing long-horizon profiles of specific FPIs for litigation support, restructuring work, or deep-historical fundamental research. They retrieve the prospectus narrative, business and capitalization descriptions, use-of-proceeds language, and exhibits tied to a specific accession to reconstruct how a given issuer presented itself to U.S. investors before Securities Offering Reform.
The use cases below are retrospective and grounded in the as-filed prospectus prose, exhibits, and metadata.json manifests on disk.
Group records by the shared 333-series fileNo in entities[] to reconstruct the full sequence of an initial F-2 and its F-2/A amendments, then diff successive prospectus bodies and compare exhibit inventories in documentFormatFiles[]. The resulting amendment chains support empirical work on SEC staff comment cycles, time-to-effectiveness for FPI short-form offerings, and the kinds of disclosure that were typically rewritten between filings.
Use the dataset as the closed pre-reform population for studies that compare FPI registration practice before and after December 1, 2005. Pull filedAt, entities[].sic, registrant jurisdiction from the facing page, and the calculation-of-fee table to build a panel of F-2 offering counts, sizes, and issuer mix, then pair it with post-2005 F-3 filings to test claims in Release No. 33-8591 about how the middle tier was absorbed.
Extract the recurring incorporation-by-reference clauses that point to each registrant's Form 20-F and intervening Forms 6-K. The clauses identify exact 20-F accession dates and 6-K furnishings, which lets researchers stitch the F-2 prospectus to the contemporaneous Exchange Act record retrieved separately from EDGAR, and lets NLP teams build a labeled corpus of FPI-specific incorporation phrasing distinct from S-2 domestic patterns.
Parse EX-1 underwriting agreements, EX-5 legality opinions, EX-23 auditor consents, and EX-25 trustee statements of eligibility to attribute underwriter, issuer's counsel, auditor, and indenture-trustee roles for late-1990s and early-2000s FPI offerings. Combine with entities[].sic, registrant jurisdiction, and the fee table to produce corrected jurisdiction- and industry-level league tables for the period, including roles often missing or misattributed in commercial deal databases.
Use the corpus as a labeled slice in SEC NLP work. The SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope plus documentFormatFiles[].type codes (F-2, EX-5.1, EX-23.2, and so on) provide ready-made section labels, and the 1996–2005 span captures the EDGAR transition from plain ASCII to HTML bodies, which is useful for testing parsers and retrieval models against both fixed-width text prospectuses and later HTML-bodied filings.
For a specific FPI that registered on Form F-2 in the period, pull every accession associated with its CIK to assemble the full set of as-filed prospectus narratives, risk factors, descriptions of capital stock or debt, use-of-proceeds language, and signature pages (including the US authorized representative). This supports litigation exhibits, restructuring diligence on legacy debt issued under an F-2, and deep-historical fundamental research that needs the registration document as actually filed rather than a later summary.
The Form F-2 Files dataset can be accessed in three ways: through a JSON index endpoint that exposes dataset metadata and per-container details, through a single archive download covering the full dataset, or by retrieving individual monthly container files.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-f2-files.json
This endpoint returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total records, total size, form types covered, container format, and file types) along with the full list of available container files. Each container entry includes its key, size, record count, last updated timestamp, and a direct download URL. The endpoint can be polled to monitor which containers were updated in the most recent refresh run, allowing consumers to download only the containers that have changed since their last sync. This endpoint does not require an API key.
Example response:
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6a38-a180-97c08c8046c4",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-f2-files.zip",
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"name": "Form F-2 Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:36:54.444Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1996-05-01",
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"totalRecords": 294,
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"totalSize": 4826647,
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"formTypes": ["F-2", "F-2/A"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-f2-files/2005/2005-11.zip",
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"key": "2005/2005-11.zip",
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"size": 138271,
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"records": 4,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:36:54.444Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-f2-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
This endpoint returns a single ZIP archive containing every Form F-2 and Form F-2/A filing in the dataset, covering the full period from May 1996 until the form was discontinued in December 2005. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-f2-files/2005/2005-11.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Individual containers are organized as monthly ZIP archives following the year/year-month.zip pattern. Use this option to fetch only the filings for a specific month rather than the full dataset, which is useful for incremental syncs based on the updatedAt timestamps reported by the index endpoint. This endpoint requires an API key.
The dataset covers Form F-2 (initial registration statements) and Form F-2/A (pre- and post-effective amendments). Both were short-form Securities Act of 1933 registration statements codified at 17 CFR 239.32 and available exclusively to foreign private issuers with an established Exchange Act reporting history.
One record is a single complete EDGAR submission of an F-2 or F-2/A registration statement, materialized as a folder named after the eighteen-digit accession number. Each folder contains a metadata.json manifest plus every non-image document from the original submission (the primary form document and all exhibits) in their native HTML or TXT formats, each preserving the EDGAR SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope.
Only foreign private issuers, as defined under Securities Act Rule 405 and Exchange Act Rule 3b-4, were eligible. The FPI also had to satisfy a 36-month Exchange Act reporting history with timely filings during the preceding 12 months, plus a transactional floor met by either a public-float test, an investment-grade non-convertible debt or preferred stock test, or another category recognized by the form's General Instructions.
The SEC eliminated Form F-2 effective December 1, 2005 under Release No. 33-8591 (Securities Offering Reform), which rescinded Forms F-2 and S-2, expanded Form F-3 eligibility, and introduced the well-known seasoned issuer (WKSI) category and automatic shelf registration. After that date, former F-2 filers migrated to Form F-3 (if seasoned-issuer eligible) or Form F-1 (if not), so the dataset is a closed historical corpus with no records after December 1, 2005.
Group records by the shared 333-series fileNo carried in entities[], not by accessionNo. Each amendment receives its own EDGAR accession and therefore its own dataset record, but the fileNo is the same as the initial F-2 filing on the same registration statement.
The manifest is JSON. The primary registration statement and exhibits are delivered as HTML in later-period filings and as TXT in earlier-period filings, with each HTML or TXT document wrapped in the original EDGAR SGML <DOCUMENT> envelope. Image attachments (GRAPHIC documents such as JPEG and GIF) and the EDGAR full-submission .txt aggregator are referenced in the manifest but are not materialized on disk.
Form F-2 is a short-form registration that incorporates the registrant's most recent Form 20-F annual report and intervening Forms 6-K by reference rather than restating that issuer-level disclosure. The 20-F content is not duplicated inside an F-2 record, so reconstructing the full disclosure package an investor saw at the time of an F-2 offering generally requires retrieving the contemporaneous 20-F (and any 6-K furnishings) separately from EDGAR.