Why do some companies have two share classes trading at different prices?

A company can list more than one class of stock: a voting common line and a non-voting preferred line, or two voting classes (Class A and Class B) with different vote weights. Both classes are claims on the same business and usually receive the same or a very similar dividend, but they trade as separate tickers at separate prices. The non-voting or lower-vote class frequently trades cheaper because buyers pay up for control.

Is a preferred share discount a buying opportunity?

It can be. If the preferred line yields the same dividend as the common but trades 30 to 60 percent cheaper, you collect a higher yield on the same cash flows. The risk is that the discount is permanent, or even widens, if the controlling family never intends to close it. Look at how the spread has behaved over time: a gap that swings between, say, 20 and 50 percent and is currently near the wide end is more interesting than one that has been flat for a decade.

Where are these spreads most common?

South Korea is the classic hunting ground (Samsung, Hyundai, LG and others list a preferred line at a wide discount), along with German Vorzugsaktien, Swiss participation certificates, Brazilian preferred shares, and Italian savings shares. Dual-class voting structures (Berkshire, Alphabet, Volvo) are a related but different case.

Share-Class Spreads: When Two Tickers Own the Same Business

Open the price chart for most companies and you see one line. But a surprising number of businesses trade under two tickers at once, and the gap between them is one of the more durable anomalies in markets.

Two claims on one business

A share class is a distinct security of the same company. The two common shapes are:

Common and preferred. The common share votes; the preferred (or non-voting) share usually does not, but carries the same or a slightly better dividend. Korea is the textbook example: Samsung Electronics lists its common stock (005930) and a preferred line (005935) that has historically traded around 25 to 40 percent cheaper for an almost identical claim on the company's cash flows. Hyundai and LG show the same pattern, sometimes wider.
Two voting classes. Berkshire Hathaway's A and B shares, Alphabet's GOOGL and GOOG, or Volvo's A and B all split voting power across classes. Here the prices track each other closely (and Berkshire's A is a fixed multiple of B by design), so the "spread" is small or mechanical.

A cross-listing is not a share class. When the identical security trades on two exchanges (a home listing plus a foreign depositary receipt), that is one security shown twice, not two claims to compare. The share-class spread is only meaningful when the two lines are genuinely different securities of the same issuer.

Why the discount exists, and why it can close

The preferred line is cheaper for real reasons: no vote, sometimes thinner liquidity, and in family controlled companies a controlling owner who has little incentive to narrow the gap. So a discount is not free money. What makes it interesting is change. Korean preferred discounts compressed sharply when corporate-governance reform and shareholder-return pressure gave the controlling families a reason to treat minority holders better. A holder who bought the preferred line while the discount was wide collected a higher dividend yield the whole time and captured the gap as it narrowed.

That is the value-investing lens: you are buying the same business at a lower price per dollar of dividends and earnings, with an option on the spread reverting toward its historical norm.

How to read the spread

The chart on each stock page (where a sibling class exists) shows two things:

Relative performance, with both classes rebased to 100 at the start of the window. This answers "has the cheaper line been catching up or falling further behind?"
The discount over time, plotted against its own average. A spread sitting well above its typical level flags a class that is unusually cheap relative to its sibling right now; one hugging the average is priced normally.

Two cautions. First, part of a durable discount is rational (the vote and the liquidity are worth something), so do not expect it to go to zero. Second, for fixed-ratio dual-class pairs like Berkshire the price gap is just the conversion ratio, not a discount, so only the relative performance line is meaningful there.

Used well, the share-class spread is a quiet way to buy a business you already like at a better price than its headline ticker suggests.