Intrinsic value of non-voting shares which don't pay dividends
What is the intrinsic value of a company's non-voting stock shares which don't pay dividends?
My understanding is stock ownership has value in the form of controlling the company or receiving a portion of the profits. Where does value derive from when neither of these is present?
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Some companies offer discounts for shareholders. I believe Disney used to do so, for example; if your family was doing the Disneyland-every-year routine that could be a significant benefit.
Even with non-voting shares, you own a portion of the company including all of its assets and its future profits. If the company is sold, goes out of business and liquidates, etc., those with non-voting shares still stand collect their share of the funds generated. There's also the possibility, as one of the comments notes, that a company will pay dividends in the future and distribute its assets to shareholders that way.
The example of Google (also mentioned in the comments) is interesting because when they went to voting and non-voting stock, there was some theoretical debate about whether the two types of shares (GOOG and GOOGL) would track each other in value. It turned out that they did not - People did put a premium on voting, so that is worth something. Even without the voting rights, however, Google has massive assets and each share (GOOG and GOOGL) represented ownership of a fraction of those assets and that kept them highly correlated in value.
(Google had to pay restitution to some shareholders of the non-voting stock as a result of the deviation in value. I won't get into the details here since it's a bit of tangent, but you could easily find details on the web.)
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