Sansern said Prayut was happy when he was informed that the ADB had raised its projection for Thailand’s growth to 4.2 per cent, compared to the 4-per-cent projection in April.

“The prime minister said a key factor contributing to the improvement in Thailand’s economy was strong exports,” Sansern said.

Exports registered 5-per-cent growth in the first quarter of this year. Increased investments by the private factor and rising consumption by consumers also contributed to the growth, Sansern quoted the premier as saying.

The spokesman said Prayut had also been informed that the trade tensions between the US and China have so far had no impact on Asia and Thailand.

The PM said that during Thailand’s political crisis, growth had shrunk to only 0.8 per cent but the Kingdom was gradually seeing higher growth, Sansern added.

Thai consumers have reached a new high in online commerce, thanks to Facebook Messenger’s latest deal with Kasikornbank for a one-stop shopping experience on mobile apps.

The deal makes online commerce on the giant social media platform easier and more convenient as payment can be done seamlessly with just a few clicks.

Under the arrangement, consumers can do away with making payment for their purchase in a separate online session.

Previously, buyers had to pay first and then send a payment receipt to merchants to complete the transaction, but the new collaboration allows shoppers to use Kasikornbank’s K PLUS to make a seamless payment on the same platform. Buyers no longer have to enter bank account numbers or switch screens while shopping.

This new system underlines the digital marketplace’s responsiveness to consumers in Thailand’s social commerce market which is growing exponentially.

The Electronic Transactions Development Agency (ETDA) estimates the country’s overall e-commerce value at around Bt137 billion for 2017, with 51 per cent of the transactions conducted on social media, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Facebook, which has more than 50 million users in Thailand, ranked one of the social platform’s top-five markets, says messaging is a key driver of rapid social commerce growth here.

Thanawat Malabuppha, president of Thai E-Commerce Association, said that social commerce is the largest segment of B2C (business to consumer) e-commerce in Thailand, accounting for 40 per cent of the overall B2C market.

A major strength of social commerce is its wide range of merchants or vendors where the cost of doing business is cheaper than using separate e-commerce websites or smaller e-marketplace platforms.

“Thais love shopping on social media platforms as they prefer to chat with merchants before making purchases. Currently, there are hundreds of thousands of small merchants and SMEs doing social commerce. The majority of Thais spend hours on social media on a daily basis,” said Thanawat.

Kasikornbank’s latest deal with Facebook Messenger allows consumers to do away with making payment for their purchase in a separate online session.

New deal allows onestop shopping on mobile apps for thai online consumers. Photo/AFP

According to John Wagner, managing director of Facebook Thailand, such a bank transfer solution gives businesses of all sizes an opportunity to close sales faster and boost engagement with their customers in a more secure and efficient way.

Wagner said that the modernisation and digitisation of people’s personal communication behaviour is transforming their expectations about how they should be able to communicate with businesses as more people are turning to messaging apps to connect with businesses around the world.

As of April, 2018, there were as many as 8 billion messages between people and businesses on Facebook Messenger apps, representing a four-fold growth year on year.

Wagner said the so-called conversational commerce (commerce on Messenger platform) was a trend that was gaining global traction, with a massive push in Thailand where the personalised online shopping experience via direct messaging has boosted customers’ trust and made them more likely to buy.

“Business messaging offers clear practical benefits such as convenience. But it can also play a much deeper, more meaningful role for both people and businesses. The sense of human connection that conversation unlocks can give consumers the confidence to convert.

“Among people surveyed who message businesses, the majority say that being able to message a business helps them feel more confident about the brand,” said Wagner.

Currently, 51 million Thais use Facebook each month. Thai SMEs are leading the world in social commerce and innovation as they were among the first to develop social commerce businesses, which is helping to fuel Thai economic growth, and becoming a major trend for SMEs in other countries.

On Facebook, people share more than 17 billion photos, and 400 million people use voice and video chat, while more than 150 million people use Instagram – also owned by Facebook – to connect with businesses on a monthly basis.

In Thailand, there are about 2.5 million SME pages on Facebook, with as many as 40 million people connected to these pages while about 100 million people outside of Thailand are connected to Thai SME pages.

 The survey covered 1,238 persons nationwide with upto 79.4 per cent having set a budget.

Delivering his keynote speech at a seminar on “Direction of the SET Index in the second half 2018” hosted by Krungthep Turakij, a sister newspaper of The Nation, he admitted that public debt would peak in the next four years but assured it would be manageable.

Apisak said the government would continue to implement fiscal expansion in order to invest more in infrastructure projects.

The government will run a deficit of Bt450 billion for fiscal year 2019, which starts in October. It has run fiscal deficits for the past three years in order to invest more in key transportation projects but he assured that the public finances remained sound as public debt was only 40.4 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Apisak, however, conceded that public debt would peak in the next four years, at about 48 per cent of GDP.

Although public debt will further rise, it will be kept below 60 per cent of GDP, considered in the safe zone that would not cause a cashflow shock, he said. Many countries in Europe, as well as Japan and the United States, have a public debt exceeding 100 per cent of GDP.

He also said that Thailand could have a balanced budget in the next 11 years. Apisak expressed his support for low interest rates in the second half of the year. “While some economists want the central bank to raise the rate, I don’t agree as inflation remains low,” he explained.

A rate rise would adversely affect many people who are just able to breathe after being under water for years, he said.

However, the minister said it was up to the Bank of Thailand, which is independent, to decide whether it wanted to keep the policy rate at the current 1.5 per cent or raise it.

To address the problem of the low income of 30 million farmers, Apisak said he would next week propose a debt-restructuring plan for farmers to the Cabinet.

Under the proposal, the state-owned Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) would allow farmers 2-3 years of debt moratorium, subsidised by a budget allocated by the government.

He said the measure would help about 2-3 million farmer families with a principal debt of not more than Bt 300,000 each. The government was also committed to reforming the farm sector in order to increase its competitiveness in the long term, Apisak stated.

He said he supported the Government Savings Bank’s debt restructuring for teachers with a combined debt of Bt450 billion. The GSB would use its own financial resources for this debt restructuring and the government would not be subsidising it, he clarified.

Apisak said he did not agree with the GSB taking legal action against teachers, as such a move could disqualify them from a career as a civil servant.

The government is reviewing a tax on motorcycles and also considering a low tax rate for engines with low gas emissions but a higher rate for higher gas emissions, according to Apisak.

Fuel taxes will also be revised aimed at reducing pollution, he said.

Apisak promised not to raise value-added tax from the current 7 per cent. To collect more tax revenue, the Revenue Department would increase its efficiency in tax collection but would not increase tax rates, he assured.

Apisak believed that a looming global trade war between major economies would have only a limited impact on the Thai economy, which is estimated to grow 4.5 per cent this year.

He said he was not worried about capital outflows from the country caused by the fear of trade wars and the US rate hike. He said capital inflows had been too much in the past few years, which had caused the baht to strengthen and hurt farmers who got less baht for their exports due to the strong local currency.

He added that the current weakening of the baht was a boon for farmers.

Pakorn Peetathawatchai, president of the Stock Exchange of Thailand, said investors should beware market volatility in the second half of the year.

He, too, was less worried about capital outflows from the equity market, saying that although foreign investors had sold Thai stocks, their holdings proportion in Thai stocks remained at about 30 per cent of total market capitalisation.

The SET will still play a key role in mobilising funds for investment in the country and neighbouring countries.

The SET will shortly introduce new financial products to serve investors. One would be depository receipts, which would allow investors to indirectly invest in foreign companies, he said. The other is the Thailand Future Fund, which will raise funds from investors for investment in infrastructure projects, he added.

Meanwhile, Nitinai Sirismatthakarn, president of Airports of Thailand (AOT ), said the tour boat tragedy in Phuket earlier this month would not have a significant impact on tourism.

According to Brett Tarnutzer, head of spectrum at GSMA, spectrum prices in Thailand have been among the highest in the world.

The 2015 spectrum auctions in the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands had record prices totalling over US$4 billion.

The upcoming auctions are set to follow a similar trend, considering the regulator’s decision of setting the reserve prices of the licences for offer in the 900MHz and 1800 MHz bands based on the high final prices from in 2015.

The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) will reclaim 850MHz and 1800MHz bands of Total Access Communication after the company’s concession end on September 15 and put them in auctions in August.

Tarnutzer said that consumers in Thailand expect to benefit from readily available and efficient mobile internet access, for which mobile operators have to finance very high capital and operating expenditure on their networks.

Excessive spectrum prices make this financing very difficult, directly impacting on the operator’s ability for promptly deploy technological solutions to meet the growing demands of mobile users.

Concerns over barriers

Given that an astounding 90 per cent of Internet users in Thailand access online content using smartphones, but only 37 per cent of the population has access to mobile broadband, the government must not let high spectrum prices be a barrier for the advancement of Thailand towards a prosperous digital economy, he added.

This highlights the need for investment in mobile networks in Thailand supported by reasonable spectrum licensing prices instead of using spectrum licensing as a tool for maximising government revenues – an unsustainable path for the mobile industry challenged by the growing user demand for mobile internet access.

Therefore, in Thailand, the investment-intensive mobile provision has become an ongoing challenge for investors due to extremely high licensing costs in addition to the already high network costs, he added.

He said that this issue is an ongoing concern for mobile investors in Thailand, especially as the world starts to move towards the emerging 5G mobile technologies.

5G requires access to much larger spectrum resources, dozens of times larger than the current spectrum requirements of 4G. In a country with extremely high spectrum prices, the 5G vision would seem a very difficult task to achieve for the detriment of citizens.

The GSMA yesterday also released a new report, ‘Spectrum Pricing in Developing Countries’, at the Mobile 360 – Africa conference in Kigali. Tarnutzer presented the report in Thailand yesterday.

According to the report, better spectrum pricing policies are needed in developing countries to improve the economic and social welfare of the billions of people that remain unconnected to mobile broadband services. The study reveals that spectrum prices in developing countries are, on average, more than three times higher than in developed countries, when income is taken into account.

This high spectrum pricing is a major roadblock to increasing mobile penetration.

Authored by GSMA Intelligence, the study also found that governments are playing an active role in increasing spectrum prices to maximise state revenues from spectrum licensing.

The GSMA study assessed over 1,000 spectrum assignments across 102 countries (including 60 developing and 42 developed countries) from 2010 through 2017, making it the largest-ever analysis into spectrum pricing in developing countries, as well as|the drivers and their potential impacts of spectrum pricing on consumers.

Among the countries included in the analysis are Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Jordan, Mexico, Myanmar and Thailand – all markets where spectrum licensing is a priority.

The paper added that setting high final prices administratively or setting high auction starting prices (eg reserve prices), artificially limiting the amount of licensed spectrum available, not sharing a clear spectrum roadmap, and setting poor auction rules are some of the policy decisions highlighted in the report that are driving high spectrum prices in developing countries.

“Citi analysts are overweight equities in Asian emerging markets, Europe and Japan, while we have a neutral view on US stocks,” Don Charnsupharindr, senior vice president at Citibank Thailand, said yesterday.

Citi forecasts growth in global earnings per share (EPS) of 13 per cent in 2018, which is supportive for global equities.

The Asia-Pacific will continue to benefit from the expansion in the global economy, estimated to reach 3.4 per cent this year – the highest mark in the past eight years, Don said.

There is a risk from a further escalation in the trade war, but that is unlikely to happen, he said of the conflict that has the United States at its centre. Political risk also creates uncertainty.

“The trade war will not have a significant impact on the growth of the global economy,” he said, referring to the most likely scenario projected by Citi.

While China and the US have been embroiled in a trade dispute, Japan and Europe have signed a free-trade agreement. This suggests global leaders still prefer free trade, Don said.

Following recent capital outflows from emerging markets, the valuation of equities in Asia are attractive with a forward price-earnings ratio (P/E) of about 12-13 times, varying across markets, while in Thailand Malaysia the ratio is about 15-16 times, he said.

The capital outflows have been caused by the rising trend in US interest rates, worries over the trade war and a strengthening in the US dollar.

The dollar is expected to weaken in the next three to six months as US tax cuts and public spending would lead to a higher budget deficit that would adversely affect investor confidence, Don said.

He noted that the baht may reverse course after its recent weakening against the US dollar.

The baht could strengthen to about 32.85-32.50 to the dollar from the current level of slightly over 33. Don said he optimistic about Thailand’s economy, which is predicted to grow 4.2 per cent this year, with a low inflation rate of 1.4 per cent. He does not think the Bank of Thailand will raise its policy rate this year.

Don said that Citi is highlighting cyclical stocks, including those in the energy, financial and information technology sectors.

“We particularly believe that tech stocks would perform well as the global trend is for technology,” he said, adding that although many countries have started to impose taxes on giant e-commerce and related tech giants, these actions would not hurt their performance.

Citi also is confident on the prospects for alternative strategy and multi-asset solutions to reduce overall portfolio risk. In terms of bonds, Citi is overweight US investment grade debt and high-yield bonds.

Returns on investment may not be as much as those for last year, as some investment portfolios rose 40 per cent last year, but returns this year would remain positive, Don said.

Chaikaseam Vadhanasiripong, chief distribution officer of Manulife Asset Management Thailand, said Manulife has partnered with Citibank Thailand to launch the Manulife Nextstep Fund Series. It has been designed as an “all-in-one investment solution” to serve Citibank’s clients who are seeking a multi-asset fund.

The fund series comprises three funds: Manulife NextStep Stable Growth FIF, Manulife NextStep Balanced Growth FIF and Manulife NextStep Dynamic Growth FIF. These are feeder funds investing in the units of the Franklin NextStep Series (the master fund), managed by Franklin Templeton Investments, one of the world’s biggest asset management companies.

Investors’ money would be allocated to portfolios managed by other managers who are specialists in their own fields, not limited to only fund managers at Franklin Templeton, in order to take advantage of their expertise, Chaikaseam said.