A characterisation of semigroups with only countably many subdirect products with $\mathbb{Z}$

Abstract

Let $\mathbb{Z}$ be the additive (semi)group of integers. We prove that for a finite semigroup $S$ the direct product $\mathbb{Z}\times S$ contains only countably many subdirect products (up to isomorphism) if and only if $S$ is regular. As a corollary we show that $\mathbb{Z}\times S$ has only countably many subsemigroups (up to isomorphism) if and only if $S$ is completely regular.