HONG KONG and Singapore are at it again. The Asian financial hub rivals are reviving a debate on dual-class shares as global competition for the hottest initial public offerings (IPOs) intensifies.

    Singapore is a few steps ahead. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong two weeks ago gave his approval to dual-class shares and other measures proposed by a panel to drive economic growth. The city-state’s stock exchange Thursday last week started a public consultation, a final hurdle before allowing the structure. Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. (HKEX) chief executive officer Charles Li in January revisited the topic after a 2015 proposal was shot down by his regulator.

    While Hong Kong is one of the world’s leading IPO venues, it’s been passed over by big Chinese mainland companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc., which listed on New York bourses, where different classes of shares are allowed. As Alibaba’s banking and payments arm Ant Financial prepares an IPO, Singapore and Hong Kong are trying to balance the interests of founding shareholders with those of other investors.

    “The timing is not a coincidence in that it is seemingly driven by high-profile IPOs that feature dual-class structures,” said Mark Humphery-Jenner, an associate professor of finance at the University of New South Wales Business School. “It is an attempt to capture a share of entrepreneurial listings and to provide an alternative to a U.S. exchange.”

    Dual-class structures comprise a class of stock, often distributed to founding shareholders, that carries more voting rights than the ordinary shares sold to the public. Facebook Inc. has said such shares allow its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to focus on long-term goals instead of being distracted by the short-term pressures of a listed company.

    About 15 percent of IPOs in the United States had the structures in 2015, up from 1 percent in 2005, according to a presentation by Gilbert Matthews, senior managing director of Sutter Securities Inc. More than half the dual-class IPOs in the United States in 2015 were technology companies.

    The New York Stock Exchange, now a unit of Intercontinental Exchange Inc., lifted a 60-year ban on dual-class shares in the 1980s, responding to competition from NASDAQ Inc. Weighted voting rights aren’t allowed in countries including Spain, South Korea and India. One reason is because many institutional investors are opposed to the structure and its implications for effective corporate governance.

    “We, as with the overwhelming majority of other long-term investors, strongly believe in ‘one share one vote,’ with control proportionate to economic interests,” said David Smith, head of corporate governance at Aberdeen Asset Management Asia Ltd., a unit of Aberdeen Asset Management Plc. (SD-Agencies)