For Hong Kong traders, it was an extraordinary spectacle. On Friday morning, shares of Li & Fung, the century-old Asian jeans-to-furniture sourcing powerhouse for retailers such as Walmart, fell 7 per cent.

The reason appeared to be a company statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange challenging arcane accounting interpretations by a little-known UBS analyst named Spencer Leung.

While the shares ended up closing down 2.6 per cent at HK$16.2, the controversy cast a spotlight on increasing worries about whether Li & Fung’s growth engine is running out of steam. Those concerns, which were also a central theme of the UBS report, have been weighing on the company’s stock price for the past few months, which is easily the worst performing stock on the Hang Seng index in 2011, down 28 per cent as of Friday.