Evaluation and Improvement of the Efficiency of Logistics Companies with Data Envelopment Analysis Model

The performance of global trade depends on the logistics industry to move products, information, finances, technology and human resources along the supply chain. The current situation during the pandemic relies on the logistics industry particularly in the courier, parcel and express service providers to deliver daily essentials. Product customization, customer demand, technological sophistication, threat of new entrants, border closure, compliance to Covid-19 regulations and global economic crisis have taken the logistics industry by storm. For the sustainment and growth of these companies, strategic decision making shall take place. A huge determinant of these decisions is the financial efficiency of the companies. Therefore, this paper aims to determine the efficiency of the logistics companies in Malaysia by analyzing their financial performances using current ratio, debt to assets ratio, debt to equity ratio, earnings per share, return on assets and return on equity with data envelopment analysis model. The results of this study found that five companies, COMPLET, GDEX, MISC, SURIA and WPRTS are efficient. This study fills the research gap by determining the efficiency scores of these companies and suggesting potential improvements for inefficient companies to enhance and optimize their financial positions

Optimizing the Asset and Liability Management of Telecommunication Company using Goal Programming Model

Since the telecommunications companies experience great competition, high churn rate, data traffic issues during the Covid-19 pandemic and the upgrade to 5G connectivity, the finance management of a telecommunications company should be analyzed to study the volatility and returns in the sector. This paper aims to develop a goal programming model to examine the asset and liability management of a telecommunication company, namely Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) in Malaysia. The result of this study shows that TM has achieved all the goals in maximizing assets, equities, profits, earnings and optimum management item while minimizing liabilities over the period of study from 2015 to 2019. Potential improvements on these goals have also been identified through this study. This paper has also contributed to the studies in financial management since past studies have not been done on asset and liability management in telecommunications companies which is rapidly growing and expanding even while the world is suffering from economy crisis during this pandemic

Performance Evaluation of Construction Companies in Malaysia with Entropy-VIKOR Model

Construction industry is an important industry that has an enormous impact on the country’s economic development. Nowadays, the government strives to encourage the construction industry to develop the advanced and modern infrastructure that related to health, transport, education, and housing. As a result, the Malaysian construction sector companies’ financial performance is studied in this paper based on the crucial financial ratios. This paper aims to assess and compare the Malaysian construction sector companies’ financial performance based on Entropy-VIKOR model. In this paper, the listed construction companies in Malaysia are investigated. The findings of this paper demonstrate that ZECON, DKLS, GADANG, TRIPLC, and MELATI are ranked as the top five construction companies based on the proposed model. The importance of this paper is to assess the construction companies’ financial performance as well as identify the weights of the financial ratios in assessing the Malaysian construction sector companies’ financial performance with the proposed Entropy-VIKOR model

CIDPro: Custom Instructions for Dynamic Program Diversification

Timing side-channel attacks pose a major threat to embedded systems due to their ease of accessibility. We propose CIDPro, a framework that relies on dynamic program diversification to mitigate timing side-channel leakage. The proposed framework integrates the widely used LLVM compiler infrastructure and the increasingly popular RISC-V FPGA soft-processor. The compiler automatically generates custom instructions in the security critical segments of the program, and the instructions execute on the RISC-V custom co-processor to produce diversified timing characteristics on each execution instance. CIDPro has been implemented on the Zynq7000 XC7Z020 FPGA device to study the performance overhead and security tradeoffs. Experimental results show that our solution can achieve 80% and 86% timing side-channel capacity reduction for two benchmarks with an acceptable performance overhead compared to existing solutions. In addition, the proposed method incurs only a negligible hardware area overhead of 1% slices of the entire RISC-V system

The investigation on the impact of financial crisis on Bursa Malaysia using minimal spanning tree

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in financial network. The financial network helps to visualize the complex relationship between stocks traded in the market. This paper investigates the stock market network in Bursa Malaysia during the 2008 global financial crisis. The financial network is based on the top hundred companies listed on Bursa Malaysia. Minimal spanning tree (MST) is employed to construct the financial network and uses cross-correlation as an input. The impact of the global financial crisis on the companies is evaluated using centrality measurements such as degree, betweenness, closeness and eigenvector centrality . The results indicate that there are some changes on the linkages between securities after the financial crisis, that can have some significant effect in investment decision making

Analysis on the Performance of Technology Companies with Z-score Model

Local technology sector plays a significant role in information and communication technology (ICT) based innovations and applications which enhance organizational performance as well as national economic growth and labor productivity. In this paper, financial performance of the listed Malaysia companies in technology sector is analyzed and evaluated. Altman’s Z-score model is proposed due to its robustness in determining companies’ financial distress level using five financial ratios as variables. The computed Z-score values classify the financial status of the companies into distress, grey and safe zones. This study investigates the financial data of 23 listed technology-based companies in the Main Market of Bursa Malaysia over the period of 2013 to 2017. The findings reveal that the percentage of safe zone companies increase throughout the five years whereas distress zone companies decline. It is concluded that financial ratio for market value of equity to total liabilities is the dominant factor that directly influences the level of financial distress among these technology-based companies in Malaysia. These research outcomes provide an insight to investors or policy makers to develop future planning in order to avoid financial failure in local technology sector