The deepening gloom gripping global stock markets does have at a bright side - fewer initial public offerings means fewer prospectuses are printed, sparing tens of thousands of trees.
'Since July, there have hardly been any IPOs, maybe just one or two,' said James Wong, the CEO of Computershare Hong Kong Investor Services, a financial market services provider.
Mr Wong said now was a good time to renew the push away from the seas of paper that flood every initial public offering, in favour of electronic documentation.
Last year alone, 10 million copies of prospectuses and annual reports were printed in Hong Kong, equivalent to nearly 140,000 trees, according to Computershare.
It was a strong year, with more than 81 companies going public in Hong Kong, a record that almost certainly will not be in reach this year - in the first 10 months there have been only 41 IPOs.
Despite the lull, companies are still printing stacks of annual reports, sending out dividend cheques and correspondences to their shareholders - amounting to 2.6 million copies last year, or 44,220 trees.