Dual-Class Shares and Market Cap: Why Tickers Get Combined

Some companies issue two (or more) classes of shares — often one with extra voting power for founders and another that most public investors trade. Each class can have its own ticker and price. Full-company market capitalization adds every class.

Key takeaways

• Dual-class setups mean more than one share type (and often more than one ticker).
• Full-company market cap conceptually adds every class. On this ranking, the provider already reports that full-company figure on each listed ticker, so the site keeps one row instead of adding those figures together.
• Ranking by a single ticker can understate size, or list the same company twice, if you treat each ticker as a separate company.
• MarketCapLens keeps one listed ticker so each company appears once, at that provider company size.

Company market cap = (price × shares) for class A + (price × shares) for class B + …

A simple picture

Suppose Northwind Co. has:

If you only looked at NWIN, you’d think Northwind was an $80B company. It isn’t — the other $20B is real equity sitting in Class B. Add the classes and you get the true $100B size.

(Prices for voting and non-voting classes are often close but not always identical; the same idea holds either way: multiply each class, then add.)

In the ranking, that is Alphabet. Class A (GOOGL) and Class C (GOOG) are the listed shares. Alphabet also has unlisted Class B shares with extra votes; those do not have a public ticker on this site. Ranking only one listed ticker would understate the company if that ticker’s figure were a class slice. Listing both GOOGL and GOOG as two companies would double-count it if each row already carried the full company cap. Either listed ticker lands on the ranked company page. Berkshire Hathaway is the same pattern with Class A and Class B: most people trade Class B; the ranking still uses the full company.

Why companies do this

Founders sometimes want public capital without giving up control. A dual-class structure lets the public own a large economic stake while a smaller, high-vote class keeps decision-making power. It’s common among large tech and media names. You don’t need to love or hate the governance debate to read a market-cap ranking — you just need to know economic size includes every class.

What goes wrong if you don’t combine classes

• Undercounting. Ranking only the liquid ticker makes the company look smaller than it is.
• Double-counting. Listing both tickers as separate “companies” inflates the list and splits one business into two rows.
• Confused comparisons. “Biggest in the sector” only works if every peer is measured the same way.

How MarketCapLens handles it

On the Financial Modeling Prep screener, each listed class of a dual-class company often already reports the full-company market cap, not a class slice. This site does not add GOOGL cap to GOOG cap. It keeps one row — the durable public ticker in the share-class map, GOOGL for Alphabet — and treats the other listed ticker as an alias so the company is not counted twice. Unlisted Class B is not a ranking row; it is already inside that provider company figure when the vendor reports full-company cap.

The ranking and sector pages therefore show companies, not tickers. For the rest of the rules (U.S. listing, size floor, update cadence), see How the MarketCapLens Ranking Works.

Related: shares outstanding vs. float — that’s about which shares trade freely, not about summing multiple classes. The market cap calculator never invents a share count by dividing ranking cap by one class’s price. Neither does the implied share price calculator.

For general education only. Nothing here is investment advice.