A furniture stock called LIIHEN

There are plenty of furniture stocks listed in Bursa Malaysia, including the recently listed HOMERITZ. Most of them are majoritically doing export business, and hence, furniture stocks are known to be cyclical and buoyed by the worldwide economic sentiment.

You would probably not be interested in furniture stock at the moment, especially when the Ringgit is going high against USD, which is not so good for export industries. However, there is one called LIIHEN (7089, 利兴) which attracted my attention.

Located in Muar the "furniture town" in Johor, Lii Hen has been around for decades since 1985, and now their furniture plants spans across an area if approximately 30 acres, undertake the full range of wood-based manufacturing activities from timber processing up to manufacturing and packaging of finished goods.

This is their corporate structure:

The boss, Mr Chua Lee Seng (蔡利成) has been active in local, state as well as national level of furniture associations, and has taken significant roles including executive advisor of Muar Furniture Association, president of Federation of Johore Furniture Manufacturers & Traders Association, etc.

Lii Hen was first listed in 2nd Board in April 2000, and transferred to Main Board in 2002. Most of the time, Lii Hen was a dull counter, except once been "goreng" around October 2004. However, it shows remarkable fundamental improvement since 2009, despite the global economic downturn.

As you can see, from 2009 onwards, its EPS surges, boosting its ROE to above 15%. And then, Lii Hen paid dividend every single quarter. If this is sustainable, it would become a dividend stock too.

Note that there was a fire incident on 28 October 2009 night at one of their main premises, and it was covered by insurance. The fire caused the total loss of buildings, inventories, plant & machinery and factory equipments amounted to RM8.3 million. The fire had caused lost of sales in 2009 Q4, and you can see that quarter has some figures gone red in the table above.

Anyhow, Lii Hen started to show better result a few months prior to the fire incident. After the fire, they promptly recovered and resume the up-trend again, as the disruption of the production capacity due to the fire incident occurred in the preceding quarter had been fully restored at rented premises in 2010 Q1. You see another red in the net profit of 2010 Q2 "due to the erosion of profit margin resulting from the depreciation of USD against RM".

Based on its closing price of RM1.23 on 9 November 2010, and using the figure of its rolling quarter:

• PE = 1.23/0.35 = 3.51
• DY = 0.145/1.23 = 12%

That's why it attracted my attention.

Click here to visit the website of LIIHEN.

Disclaimer: This article is intended for sharing of point of view only. It is not an advice or recommendation to buy or sell any of the mentioned stock counters. You should do your own homework before trading in Bursa Malaysia.

How to make your boss like you

The November 2010 issue of Personal Money magazine has an article titled "9 Ways To Get Into Your Boss' Good Books" which I believe is very advisable for all employee to read, understand and practise in order to excel in their career.

The 9 tips to let your boss like you are:

• Make your boss look good
• Understand your boss
• Understand your boss' expectations and do more than is expected of you
• Provide solutions rather than problems
• Working independently on the job
• Make your time count
• Communicate with your boss
• Watch your code of conduct
• Showing positivism in your life and work

Beside that, the following are something usually done by employee to please their boss, but might not work at all:

• Trying to look productive but nothing is happening
• Making your boss look good in the wrong way
• Tripod-ding and apple-polishing
• Working overly independent of your boss

For detailed explanation of all the above points, grab yourself a copy of November 2010 Personal Money magazine and read through page 59-61.

Using Dropbox service to sync, backup, share and publish files

Nowadays most of us have more than one computing devices - desktop, laptop, netbook, smartphone, tablet (eg. iPad), etc.

It would be nice if we can seamlessly synchronize some of our commonly accessed data files across those computing devices, so that the file will store in each (or some) of them, and always be accessible to us regardly we are at home, at work, at other place, or even on the road.

If the file is updated by us in one of the computing devices, we would like the same file storing in our other computing devices to also be updated to the latest. Technically, we call this as "synchronize" or "sync".

Dropbox is among the services that can answer that need. It uses cloud computing technology to enable users to store and share files and folders across the Internet with synchronization.

Data transmission of Dropbox is encrypted with SSL, and data stored in Dropbox cloud service is encrypted with AES-256. Dropbox uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage, which is the same cloud backend storage used by Ubuntu One.

One of the advantage of Dropbox is it supports multiple platform, including Windows, Macintosh, Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.), Android devices, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc.

All files stored in Dropbox cloud storage are automatically backup. You have the option to undelete the files in your Dropbox folder. If you make changes to the files, you can also retrieve back earlier version of the files. For free account, Dropbox keeps 30 days of your files undo history. You can opt to have unlimited undo history by subscribing to their Pack-Rat service.

Beside synchronizing files and folders among your own computing devices, you can also share out one or more folders in your Dropbox with other Dropbox user(s). You control who to share the folder with by inviting them with a special link, and the invitee has to Accept your invitation to initiate the sharing.

There is no special ACL in Dropbox sharing. Everybody who is sharing the folder can make changes in that folder. Anyhow, all the changes will be versioned and kept in history, and can be undone if necessary. In the event 2 or more persons are editing the same file in the shared folder, Dropbox will save the file in different filename to avoid overwriting.

Once you installed Dropbox, you'll notice there are 2 default special folders automatically created - Public and Photos. Files and folders resided in the Public folder can be shared out even to non-Dropbox users. This is made possible as the file there is accessible with a unique special URL, which you can disclose in email, instant message conversations, blogs, etc. However, the files will not be searcheable by search engine like Google.

The sharing concept of the Photos folder is similar to Public. In addition to that, Photos sharing enables you to have an online gallery of your shared photos with unique special URL to each of the folders inside as individual Album.

Dropbox provides 3 account options. The Basic account is free, and started with 2GB online storage. The other 2 are paid Pro account with 50GB or 100GB online storage.

The Basic account storage is expandable for another 8GB up to a total of 10GB by:

• Creating your account with a referal link (add 250MB once you installed your Dropbox client)
• Inviting your friends to create their own Dropbox account (add 250MB each after they've installed their Dropbox client)
• Becoming a Dropbox Guru (add 250MB, refer to the "Get Started" tab in your Dropbox web interface)

Microsoft has just released Windows Live Mesh 2011 (after long period of beta of Live Mesh, Windows Live Sync and Windows Live FolderShare) with similar function and providing 5GB free online storage in SkyDrive. However, Windows Live Mesh 2011 does not support Linux. Worse still, it also does not support Windows XP and earlier version of Windows. Currently, it also doesn't support any mobile devices.

Therefore, if you are upset with the limitation of Windows Live Mesh 2011, perhaps Dropbox is your alternative.

Click here to open your free Dropbox account with 2.250 GB free initial Cloud storage.

Click here for a list of interesting Dropbox Addons. For example, Dropbox Folder Sync can make your live easier to sync folders into Dropbox, and they can still reside in their original location. This is useful for you to sync your IE Favorites, Firefox Profiles, etc.