It is not terribly unusual for some companies to create a dual class structure for the stock. Hershey, Google, and Ford immediately come to mind. In every example of this I have ever studied, the purpose is to keep ownership control in the hands of a select few that want to maintain control over the company by scaling back their investment in it. It’s a controversial practice—people think that investors with $500 million worth of stock should wield 10x as much influence as someone with $50 million in the firm. Others find the practice tolerable because investors have notice of the arrangement at the time they make their investment, and plus, the original founding families that own the firm through the decades may have more of a long-term orientation than some random guy that gets his hands on a large block of stock.
Brown Forman, one of the most legendary … Read the rest of this article!
