“The strategy to develop a smart city in the EEC is the right one to drive the country’s growth and develop the country’s innovation under the Thailand 4.0 national strategy,” Mazur said. “We also have innovations and technology to support the country to achieve the target by focusing on three categories – building smart, energy, and mobility.”

He said the company’s strategy was also to support a Thai company that is planning to build trams in Thailand.

A Thai firm has been discussing with Siemens on possible options to provide the technology to assemble trams in Thailand. The Thai firm plans to invest 10 to 15 million euros (Bt380 million to Bt576 million) in the first stage for manufacture of equipment. The tram assembly plant will tentatively be located in northeastern Thailand.

“The initiative to assembly of trams is currently on hold as the Thai firm is waiting to see if the Thai government will approve trams for major provinces such as Khon Kaen, Chiang Mai, and Phuket,” said Mazur.

“If the government approves it, the Thai firm, whose name cannot be revealed at this stage, will make a decision to invest.”

If the initiative to provide technology to produce trams in Thailand is finalised, Thailand will host a plant to produce trams in Asean countries, Mazur added.

Mazur said that Thailand is the main market for Siemens Mobility in the Asean bloc, and the firm has a backlog to supply railway infrastructure and trains for Thai firms worth up to 1 billion euros. Delivery of trains to Thai firms will begin this year and run until 2020 and will include Bangkok Mass Transit System Plc, Bangkok Expressway and Metro Plc.

The company is confident its business in Thailand will experience strong growth following the government’s policy to expand investment to develop the country’s infrastructure, especially the rail system, he said. He wouldn’t estimate how large a market share Siemens would gain from Thailand’s upcoming investments in new infrastructure. It is now a highly competitive market sector, he said, with newcomers from China, Japan, and other countries expanding beyond their domestic markets and competing for government and private-sector mobility contracts.

However, said Mazur, his company is confident that their long experience in supplying products and services to Thai firms will stand them in good stead with customers.

“We have long experience in Thailand and 450 staff to provide maintenance services to our customers. This will build confidence in customers in our products and our servicing,” he said.

While the government will continue to directly spend on infrastructure investment, it has recently shifted to include more private investment under public-private partnerships. Siemens expects that its business in Thailand will enjoy strong growth in both kinds of projects, said Mazur.

He added that up to 70 per cent of its total revenue this year will be from supplying products to customers, with the remaining 30 per cent coming from the service and maintenance business. This is a shift from last year, where 80 per cent of its total revenues came from service and maintenance and 20 per cent from supplying products.

“We have confidence that Thailand’s economy will achieve strong growth this year and the next due to the Thai government’s policy to drive the country towards innovation and a digital economy under Thailand 4.0,” Mazur said. “This is the right policy to drive the country’s economy to have sustainable growth for the long term.”

Bulapond Bunsuwan, 57, is the third generation of the family to run the business and is keen to expand the market for the dessert line to other provinces this year. In doing so, she is aiming to double the family company’s rate of sales growth next year.

“I have committed an investment budget of Bt5 million to build my new plant to a level that meets the requirements of the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certification and Halal standards,” Bulapond said in an interview with The Nation recently.

“The plant will also incorporate a freezing process that will extend the shelf life of the desserts from two days to six months. This capability will help me to expand the market beyond Hat Yai, Songkhla, to other provinces in Thailand.”

Bulapond said she began spending the investment funds last year and the new production facility will be completed and ready to operate in the last quarter of this year.

Bulapond said that, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in management, she went straight into lecturing at a college. But when the family business began to face difficulties, she had to leave behind her academic career and help them out.

“The family had been in the business of making Thai desserts since my grandmother had started out doing this and this was continued by my mother. Along the way, they had moved from operating in a small shop to opening a restaurant in Hat Yai, Bulapond said.

“Then I resigned from my job as a lecturer to help my family with the restaurant. Around that time I gave more thought to the desserts that we served. In particular, I decided to make some popular desserts such as Khao Tom Mud, which is made from sticky rice, coconut, and some fruits such as banana, along with taro, black bean and other ingredients.”

Bulapond threw herself into making Khao Tom Mud offered at her mother’s restaurant, which is managed by her younger daughter. The desserts are also distributed at outlets such as Cafe Amazon and Doi Kham, known for its health food range, in Hat Yai district.

From an investment budget of Bt5,000 in 2009, the dessert operation began generating sales at an average of Bt6,000 a day and has now reached Bt1 million a month, or Bt12 million a year.

Bulapond said that she began with Khao Tom Mud and added other well-known Thai desserts such as Maphao Kaew, made from sweet dried coconut, as well as rice snacks and other items.

As well as the brisk sales from locals, the desserts have become popular as souvenir items bought by visitors to Hat Yai district. Bulapond has also opened a shop at Hat Yai International Airport as part of her efforts to expand sales.

However, a constraint on sales is that the dessert items have a limited shelf life; for the Khao Tom Mud, this is only two days. And this dessert makes up 70 per cent of the annual sales.

The need to overcome this problem prompted to her take on the Bt5 million investment to build the new plant. Key to this was cooperation with the Prince of Songkla University for research into the development of a machine that will enable a freezing process for the Khao Tom Mud. The resulting six-month shelf life for the popular dessert will open up new sales opportunities beyond the local district and into other provinces.

Part of the investment funds came from Bulapond’s savings in addition to a loan from the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Bank, guaranteed by the Thai Credit Guarantee Corporation.

“Our plant will completed this year and that will double our sales, and we may need to increase staff numbers to handle to the business expansion, as most of our production process is still carried out by hand,” Bulapond said.

In identifying the key to her success, Bulapond said that while Khao Tom Mud is considered a national Thai dessert, it is her use of quality local products that makes her brand stand out. The addition of more flavours – such as banana, beans, chicken, durian and various cereals – creates differentiation in the market, she said.

The company said the move would help companies in Thailand with their plans for digital transformation against the backdrop of the government’s Thailand 4.0 policy.

Pavin Vorapruck, managing director of HP Inc (Thailand), said that the firm this year is focusing on the computing and printing businesses to support four |market segments: healthcare, |education, manufacturing and financial businesses.

For the computing business, the company provides desktops, mini-desktops, tablets, points of sale devices, notebooks, and mobility devices in terms of device as a service (DaaS) for larger enterprises.

He said that a growth area for the company’s computing business has been gaming computers and virtual reality products amid growing demand in these areas.

The company is also providing a new product category in the form of Sprout, which is all-in-one touch-driven 3D computing system built with a PC, projector, hi-resolution cameras, Touch Mat and 2D and 3D capture capabilities.

It is designed for the manufacturing industry.

Pavin said that for the printing business, the company is focusing on enterprise printing. It provides managed printed services (MPS) to support enterprise and organisation on a pay-per-use basis.

“We are focusing on those segments with high potential and provide total solutions to support the demands of companies in these segments amid high competition in the information technology (IT) market in the country,” Pavin |said.

“I think that our IT outsourcing services will help customers reduce the costs of investment. In the printing business, this can help customers save costs in the range of 50-70 per cent per year.”

He said the firm provides a PageWide printer to address needs in the printing industry, as well as 3D printers.

“HP is continuing to enjoy growth in the Thai market. We have a full range of computing and printing product portfolio such as desktop computers, workstations, MPS, DaaS, virtual reality, the PageWide printer and 3D printers to support education, manufacturing, healthcare and financial services – which are sectors with high potential growth in the country,” he said.

“Our product portfolio also support the digital transformation under the Thailand 4.0 scheme.”

Arnel Redondo Reyes, head of information technology at CMHL, said at a press conference on Thursday that the firm would continue investing in its digital transformation process to ensure better services for customers.

“The consumer goods sector becomes an extremely important and integral part of Myanmar’s economy, and is expected to grow significantly this year,” he said, citing the market is estimated to be around 15 per cent of the nation’s GDP or US$7.5 billion.

Driven by consumer spending which is projected to triple from $35 billion to $100 billion by 2030, the firm has planned to invest around $10 million for its digitalisation process which includes covering telecommunication costs, maintenance of the equipment, payment for licence fees of the softwares deployed, and other related expenses. Part of the investment goes to its strategic partnership with VMware, he said.

On the business challenges, Reyes said, “We felt that our legacy IT infrastructure was holding us back as we struggled constantly with downtime. The inventory management system would crash and the server would be down for 1.5 days while they scrambled to restore from backups. Our IT was impacting our revenues.”

He said downtime of up to 1.5 days adversely impacted the firm’s revenue, as it resulted in supply chain issues and unfulfilled customer orders.

“We set about modernising our IT infrastructure to support the entire network of our stores. We deployed the VMware vCloud Suite with hybrid cloud management platform. This allowed us to consolidate servers and data centres and improve application availability and performance,” he said.

Established in 1996, the firm currently has more than 8,000 employees in over 180 branches across the nation.

Reyes said investing in a software-defined infrastructure and automation of core IT processes was a critical move which paid off immensely.

“The move removed server downtime and cut operational costs by up to 50 per cent. We could also leverage predictive analytics and smart alerts to improve system performance,” he said.

According to Reyes, the retailer will continue to work with VMware so it can migrate all business operations onto a centralised SAP system within two years.

He said the partnership would help City Mart eliminate system downtime, thereby improve responsiveness to demand by rolling out new products faster and deliver better customer service.

“As our customer base expands, our infrastructure needs an upgrade to support the scale and breadth of our operations. Deploying VMware’s cloud infrastructure solutions empowers us to break through the next frontiers in retail,” he said.

To him, the partnership helps the retailer ensure goods are in stock at all times, resulting in better warehouse management and stronger relations with suppliers.

“With the help of VMware’s technology, we can easily know how many goods have been sold out and how many are left in the warehouse so we can supply all the best-selling goods before they are out of stock. We can also see how much a store can sell, which stores are selling what, etc. It is really helpful to our management,” he said.

Sanjay K. Deshmukh, VMware’s vice president and managing director for Southeast Asia and Korea, said businesses need the right network foundation to harness and flex new technology.

“Consumer demand and preferences are evolving rapidly in today’s retail sector, especially in a fast-growing economy like Myanmar,” he said. He added City Mart would seize opportunities and gain higher returns through its investment on virtualising IT infrastructure.

Tuntun Linn, VMWare’s country representative for Myanmar, said the technology could ensure better services for enterprises.

“Virtual machines can move from one physical machine to another. For example, imagine there are data centres in three cities_ Yangon, Mandalay and Mawlamyaing. Even if a data centre in Yangon is down, this application can move to another data centre in a different location. So, the service is never interrupted,” he explained.

The accord was signed on Friday at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse by Usanee Sangsingkeo, acting president of THAI, and Eric Schulz, chief commercial officer of Airbus, in the presence of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha. Also on hand was Guillaume Faury, president of Airbus Commercial Aircraft.

The new MRO will be one of the most modern and extensive in the Asia-Pacific region, offering heavy maintenance and line services for all widebody aircraft types. The facility will feature the latest digital technologies to analyse aircraft maintenance data, as well as advanced inspection techniques, including the use of drones to monitor aircraft airframes.

The MRO complex will also have specialised repair shops, including for composite structures, as well as a maintenance training centre offering extensive courses for technical personnel from Thailand and overseas.

“THAI and Airbus have undertaken extensive studies to validate the business plan for this exciting project,” said Usanee. “Together we will develop one of the most advanced and efficient aircraft maintenance centres anywhere in the world. We are confident that this venture will bring significant economic benefit for THAI and will be a major driver in the development of the wider aerospace sector in Thailand.”

Faury said: “We are pleased to enter into this major agreement with THAI. This will further strengthen the long-term partnership between our two companies and also contribute to the success of Thailand’s new eastern economic zone. With the fleet of widebody aircraft in the Asia-Pacific region set to triple to around 4,800 aircraft over the next 20 years, the project represents a sound business opportunity for both our companies.”

Schulz said: “This latest agreement further consolidates our long and special partnership with THAI. This dates back to 1977, when THAI became one of our earliest customers. Since that time Thai has operated every single Airbus type and today flies the complete current widebody family – the A330, the A350 and the A380.”

The joint venture between Airbus and THAI will be located at U-Tapao airport in the heart of the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC). The EEC is a core part of the government’s Thailand 4.0 policy, designed to develop world class innovative technology-based manufacturing and services in the country.

This year, KBank expects to extend Bt3 billion of loans for independent businesses via this platform.

Surat Leelataviwat, KBank vice president, said: “We always emphasise the support of SME customers who are a major contributor to KBank and a key driver for the Thai economy.

“However, most SME operators have faced difficulties in gaining access to funding due to the unavailability of financial data for loan approval, lack of collateral and no financial planning, resulting in business interruption and lost opportunities.”

Starting from Bt2,850, the promotional price is available from 25 to 26 June, the airline said

“The new NokScoot Japan route received great feedback from customers because it is not only more convenient to travel to Japan from Thailand, but this route also allows travellers to experience the different cultures of two countries in ways they never have before.

“Thailand and Japan continue to have a great relationship, and this is an opportunity for NokScoot to act as a bridge and help strengthen the friendship even further,” said Yodchai Sudhidhanakul, CEO of NokScoot

“We hope that travellers from both countries will be able to experience a memorable visit,” added Yodchai.

This follows the June 20 announcement that GPSC will acquire 69 per cent of the total issued shares of Glow Energy Public Company Limited and will submit a tender offer for the remaining shares for Bt141.2 billion. The acquisition will be initially funded by Bt142.5 billion in bridging facilities, which will mature in one year from the deal’s completion.

The acquisition and bridge loan refinancing is subject to various approvals, including by the GPSC shareholders and regulatory authorities.