Such an offering from one red chip almost was torpedoed by controversy in April.
Researchers fed college students watching television Lay's Stax with a red chip placed at various intervals throughout the canister in a 2012 study.
But while the Hang Seng has recovered to within 30% of its August 1997 all-time high, the red chip index is still 57% off its peak.
So popular, in fact, that the market's red chip index has rocketed over 80% since hitting bottom in mid-January, compared to the blue-chip Hang Seng Index's 40% gain over the same period.
Ev en in Hong Kong some stocks look attractive: conglomerates like CITIC Pacific, which is the premier red chip, or First Pacific and Hutchison Whampoa, or even HSBC, which is a strong, global bank.
It used to go like this -- a red chip would issue new shares and use the cash to buy assets cheaply from its parent, the new assets would balloon the company's turnover and profit, allowing it to issue more shares and go around the circle again.
But van der Kamp thinks the market will be fine so long as the red-chip frenzy does not spill over into the rest of the bourse.
Andy Xie, chief China economist for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Hong Kong, points out that if foreign creditors don't roll over debts for red-chip companies, most of which are severely overstretched financially, the latter could start going under too.
Case in point, NVIDIA's rumored LTE-capable Tegra 4, allegedly clocked up to 2GHz or Intel's Red Ridge Medfield chip, which we saw pop up at the FCC earlier this month.
Fa'atau spotted the lack of cover to chip in behind the advancing line of red shirts and Max Evans fielded the bouncing ball deftly to go under the posts.
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