How large should a discount for lack of marketability be? When is a control premium justified — and how big? Every listed-company circular with a business valuation answers these questions somewhere in its hundreds of pages. Until now, no one had read them all.

This seminar presents the first-ever ten-year longitudinal study of marketability discounts (DLOM) and control premiums (CP) in the Hong Kong market. Drawing on a full decade of Notifiable Transaction circulars — more than 470 adopted figures across nearly 300 circulars and some 200 valuation firms — it maps where these adjustments have actually landed, year by year, valuer by valuer: the stable averages and the enormous ranges behind them, the extreme cases that halve or lift a valuation, the striking divergence between Hong Kong and mainland valuers, and the handful of American studies that quietly underwrite most Hong Kong discounts and premiums.

Just as significant is how the study was built. After three years of manual quarterly collection, the entire record is now read end-to-end by a purpose-built AI system running privately on a single laptop — every figure quoted verbatim from the source page, cross-checked by independent AI models that must agree, and reconciled through the valuation’s own arithmetic before a human signs it off. The session shows, in plain terms, what it takes to teach a machine to read a valuation report — and why the result is a living, auditable benchmark for a profession whose job is to gatekeep valuation quality.

Who should attend

This session is designed for listed companies — directors, CFOs, company secretaries and investor-relations teams — and the advisers who stand behind their transactions: financial advisers, IFAs, auditors, reporting accountants and legal counsel. Regulators and exchange professionals will find a decade of evidence on where practice actually stands. And investors, analysts and fund managers will see what sits behind the numbers they rely on — or challenge.