HK GROUP INVESTS IN KABUL FURNITURE

By Victoria Burnett, The Financial Times

Home Essentials, the Hong Kong-based furniture rental company, has opened
an office in Kabul, joining a booming market for goods and services that
has grown around the city's foreign aid organisations and embassies.

The company, which says it is the largest of its kind outside the US,
expects to invest about Dollars 1m during the next two years and employ 50
local staff.

It said its clients in the Afghan capital included UK diplomats - many of
whom live in converted shipping containers - and Crown Agents, a UK
company that is advising the Afghan government on institutional
development.

During the past three years, demand for goods and services has soared in
Kabul as foreign aid organisations and embassies establish permanent bases
in the capital, while the renascent private sector sets up offices and
shops and the government refurbishes dilapidated offices.

Foreign companies, many of them Asian, offer banking services, generators,
security guards, car-hire and communications equipment.

One local furniture company, VFF, has done swift trade selling Ikea-style
furniture - a rare find in a furniture market whose aesthetic appears
frozen in the late 1960s.

Christopher Exline, Home Essentials' founder and president, said the
latest venture "vividly affirmed the improving market conditions for
business in Kabul".

Home Essentials, whose parent company is Texas-based Exline Pan Pacific,
has offices in several Asian capitals and made its first foray into the
post-conflict world last year, when it set up an office in Baghdad.

It targets expatriates who cannot find the furniture they need in their
new location or want to avoid adding a furniture allowance to their
taxable income by buying or renting the furniture abroad.

Naseem Akbar, of the Afghan Investment Support Agency, welcomed the
investment yesterday. "It definitely sends a strong message to the
investor community. (The home fixtures market) is just one more sector
that needs to be developed to an international standard."