To be or not to be? – An empirical study on dual-class share structure of US listed Chinese companies

Dual-class share structure (DCSS) is prohibited in Mainland China currently with the OSOV (one share one vote) principle clearly written in both the Chinese company law and listing rules . As a result, those American stock exchanges become attractive to Mainland Chinese companies due to their tolerance of takeover defences, in particular, DCSS. To seek the soft regulation with the issuance of multiple voting shares, dozens of Chinese companies chose the American stock exchanges as their IPO (initial public offering) venues. In this paper, empirical research will be conducted to analyse those US-listed Mainland Chinese companies with DCSS. This paper aims to assess those transnational companies, their characteristics and corporate performances.
As to the range of data to be covered, only those companies listed after 2011 will be sampled in this paper. It is because some of those data of the Mainland Chinese companies on NYSE or NASDAQ listed prior to 2011 were not available or were inaccurate; counting them leads to misleading results. Furthermore, those data is dated for such a changing area of law. In order to reflect the up-to-date status accurately, this paper focuses its empirical study of data which date back to 2011.

Reproduced with permission from the Journal of International Business and Law.

Spring 2017