Investors in Hong Kong can be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu now that the city is looking again to square the circle for technology companies that are at once drawn to its highly liquid stock market yet repelled by its strict listing rules.
Ever since the city lost Alibaba’s record $25 billion initial public offering in 2014 to New York, the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing HKEx has been sweating hard to attract hot technology deals, primarily from China.
Dual-class shareholdings, whereby one set of shares typically held by the founding partners have more voting rights than publicly held shares, are the...