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The ship looks set to sail on Britain’s aversion to dual-class shares. A government commissioned review, released on Friday, backs the structure, which is popular with tech founders keen to retain control after taking public money.
Lex, among others, has opposed weighted voting rights as poor governance. Advocates point to the bigger picture: spurn dual-class shares and lose out on big initial public offerings. London would not be the first to cave. A similar argument saw Hong Kong capitulate after Alibaba took its record $25bn IPO to New York in 2014. Singapore swiftly followed suit; even Shanghai now hosts companies with dual-class shares on its tech-oriented board.
Ron Kalifa, author of the UK report, lays out the numbers: the US nabbed 39 per cent of the 3,787 IPOs on major exchanges between 2015 and 2020, while the UK took under 5 per cent. US companies with dual-class shares have outperformed peers, but this is as much to do with tech credentials as, say, Mark Zuckerberg’s stranglehold on Facebook votes. Proponents also applaud the poison pill conferred by weighted voting rights. This, they say, would have seen off pesky foreign buyers of British assets such as Arm and Worldpay, coincidentally Kalifa’s own old shop.
If dual-class shares are inevitable, curbs should be too. Sunset clauses, converting founders’ shares to ordinary class over time, are one obvious step already in use. At Slack, for example, shares convert over 10 years to common stock. Another is to exclude certain votes; on executive pay, say, or related party transactions.
One big caveat: dual-class shares will not open the floodgates to new listings. Ask Hong Kong, a market four times as liquid as London. Post-relaxation of the rules, China tech listings continued to flock to the US because valuations are higher. Last year, despite ground-zero Sino-US relations and tightened accountancy rules, Chinese tech companies flocked to the US. The current run of “homecomings†— US-listed companies such as Alibaba securing secondary listings in Hong Kong — is politically driven. More effective, certainly, but not an option for the UK.
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