Mainland companies may consider turning to Hong Kong for IPOs to save time with the convenience brought by the upcoming Stock Connect program, market players said during a seminar on Tuesday.

"The Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program will help lift the number of mainland firms listing in Hong Kong," Judy Huang, representative of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing's (HKEx) Beijing office, told the Global Times on the sidelines of a seminar organized by accounting firm Ernst & Young.

Many firms planning to launch IPOs in the A-share market may consider changing the route to Hong Kong for fundraising as the forthcoming Stock Connect program will enable mainland investors to buy the firms' shares directly from Hong Kong bourse, Huang said.

The securities regulators in the mainland and Hong Kong agreed on the connect program in April, which will enable international investors to trade Shanghai A shares via the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, while mainland investors will be allowed to trade Hong Kong H shares via the Shanghai Stock Exchange, subject to quotas.

Despite months of preparation and rounds of technical testing among stock brokerage firms, the debut date of the program is not yet finalized, although it was previously speculated to be October 27.

Investors from the mainland must have at least 500,000 yuan ($81,300) in their stock accounts to buy Hong Kong shares through the stock connect program.

About 7.6 million stock accounts in the mainland are estimated to meet this minimum requirement, and can bring 1 trillion yuan worth of trading to the Hong Kong bourse and greatly boost liquidity in the international financial hub, Paul Chau, managing director of BOCI Asia Ltd, said at the seminar.

Even before the bullish news of the Stock Connect program, the number of listings by mainland companies in Hong Kong has been rising in recent years.

Among the 89 new listings in Hong Kong in the first nine months of this year, 60 were by mainland firms, according to the HKEx, up about 40 percent from the same period of 2013.

A major reason for going public in Hong Kong rather than in Shanghai or Shenzhen is because it saves time, Li Xiangli, chairman and president of Beijing Huaxia Lihong Commodity Inspection Co, told the Global Times on the sidelines of the seminar.

"I could no longer wait," Li said. His firm, a licensed third-party quality inspection agency, has been preparing for an IPO for two years, and recently decided to try to get listed in Hong Kong given it could take years to do so in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

As of October 10, 590 firms are still waiting in line for IPO approval in the mainland bourses, according to stock information portal cnstock.com, largely due to the accumulation from a 14-month listing hiatus and lengthy review process.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission suspended new listings in the A-share market from November 2012 until January 2014, as it initiated a campaign to fight against insider trading and financial fraud, and launched stock listing reform.

An IPO in Hong Kong normally takes less than a year, which is much shorter than in the mainland.

Beijing Digital Telecom Co, a mobile phone distributor, which initially applied for an IPO in the A-share market in 2011, withdrew the application in June 2013 and turned to Hong Kong bourse after having waited for approval for two years, said Huang Jianhui, senior vice president of the company, at the seminar.

The mobile phone retailer finally got listed in Hong Kong in July this year.

There are some inconveniences for mainland companies to raise money on the Hong Kong bourse though, one major problem being the prohibition of trading of pre-IPO shares of the mainland firms in Hong Kong.

The other impediment is that moving the money raised in Hong Kong back to the mainland is still subject to the foreign exchange regulator's review and approval.

However, the inconveniences are expected to be removed gradually after the Stock Connect program is launched.