Any updates from today’s AGM?

Slam drum: directors do not intend to do any share buyback at this time

Taking care of the staff is good. but you should look at who gets the lions share of the esos - it is the directors be substantial shareholders who already own most of the company.I do not think they need any more incentive to work harder. This is one way to rip off minority shareholders

Next AGM, just go and make a lot of noise about this, then vote against the resolution. Send a message to the directors

However, PBT is still one step away from the bottom line, which is what interests us investors the most, along with FCF of course. Since there is no more tax break for the company effective 1 January, the tax rate is now approximately 23%. This means that moving forward, the net profit margin will be lower than prior years, and hence the net profit and FCF as well.

In short, Q1 results were actually good, since revenue, gross profit, and PBT all increased yoy, if you ignore the forex losses. However, due to increased tax rate, the company's fundamentals has deteriorated slightly compared to before.

If you strip out this forex loss, then the company would actually have made a PBT of approx. 7.7m, instead of the reported 4.4m. This would compare to the PBT of 3.4m in the preceding year's corresponding quarter (adjusted down for 0.4m of forex/derivative gains). This means that the PBT actually jumped by ~120% yoy.

This would make sense if you take into consideration the fact that their gross profit increased from 7.8m to 14.9m, an increase of approximately 90%. Coupled with the higher profit margins due to higher average USD exchange rate, then the 120% increase in PBT makes sense.

FLBHD 16Q1 net profit was flat yoy which caused many people to misunderstand that the company's profits are not growing, especially if one only considers its EPS blindly. However, if one would just examine the results closely, one would realize that this flat net profit was caused primarily by two factors: forex losses and higher tax rate since 1 Jan 2016 due to revocation of previous tax benefits. Let's examine each one in detail.

16Q1 accounts was reported on 31 March 2016, where the RM/USD was at approximately 3.92, which was near its multi-month low. This was unfortunate for its Q1 results, because 15Q4 was reported on 31 December 2015 where the exchange rate was at 4.30, near a multi-year high. This meant that when the company's USD-denominated receivables/payables/cash/loans were translated to RM, the company suffered a loss of 3.6m due to forex, offset by a small gain on derivatives of 123k (used precisely to hedge against these forex movements).