A month ago, Keshav and I wrote about the strange story behind RRP Semiconductor’s 900X stock jump and India’s chip fever. 

Its summary reveals some of the company’s many ironies.  

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There’s a lot more intrigue from where that came. A small-volume-big-price-spike mystery. A whodunit. Here’s the full story.

Now, more strange things have happened over the past few weeks.

Here’s a list–it would be comic if it weren’t so alarming. The most serious of these are the misses by the BSE, the country’s second-largest stock exchange on which the RRP Semiconductor stock trades.

In its September quarter results, RRP Semiconductor declared something truly rare: negative revenue of Rs 7 crore. The company attributed this to a reversal of revenue it had recognised earlier. This reversal–due to a dispute with a client over solar panel installations (not semiconductor deals)–means that the company moved from marginally positive revenue until the March quarter, to zero revenue in the June quarter, to negative revenue in the September quarter. Yet, the stock commands a market capitalisation of over Rs 15,000 crore.

Speaking of which, the RRP Semiconductor stock continued to surge even after the BSE first flagged the unusual price surge on 20 October and put the stock on enhanced surveillance measures. It rose every single trading day by 2%, climbing from an already astronomical Rs 9,292 to Rs 11,784 on 7 November. On that day, the BSE imposed tighter trading restrictions, in effect allowing the stock to move just 1% every week.

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Ideally, the BSE should have stepped in far earlier, as The Ken wrote in October. 

That it took more than a fortnight after its own warning to tighten the squeeze is even more remarkable. But then, the stock market and its players are far from ideal.

This raises the question: what is the ideal price for RRP Semiconductor?  Well, the company thinks it should be trading at Rs 20. Here’s what it said to the exchange on 14 November.

Now, with a 1% downmove allowed by the BSE each week, the RRP Semiconductor stock will take more than 12 years to reach Rs 20 apiece, even though its run-up to these heights took just a year and a half.