Hi,
I did, I had to enable write uv sets and uv write (not sure which one exactly made uvs appear in houdini) and when I noticed normals problem I tired no normals and that didn't work. No other option looksa like it has anything to do with normals but i'll keep trying nevertheless.
The whole maya alembic - houdini workflow seems to be incredible convoluted, to my absolute astonishment I discovered that material assignments are not included in alembic file, so I had to export static fbx file, edit mental 10m long name attributes maya generates on both files until they matched and loop through all the objects to transfer names of materials from fbx to alembic.