The first Daruma Sushi restaurant, which was established some 15 months ago, quickly proved popular among lovers of Japanese food because of the particular attention given to quality ingredients and competitive prices.
Metha, 35, owner and managing director of Daruma Sushi Restaurant, said that after working as a salaryman for two months, he decided to quit his job and work at a Japanese restaurant near his house in Bangkok.
He had in fact always dreamed of having his own catering business since the five years he spent studying in the Australian city of Sydney, where he worked part-time at Thai restaurants and realised his love for cooking and dealing with people.
After gaining experience at a Japanese restaurant in Bangkok, Metha took a course in sushi cooking at the Dusit Thani Hotel, and began to seek a good location to fulfil his dream and open his own restaurant.
With an initial investment of Bt2 million, he opened the first Daruma Sushi outlet at Udomsuk Soi 50 off Sukhumvit Road, where he also took on the role of chef.
The main thing he always keeps in mind is the need to use good-quality raw materials in preparing food for his customers, so that they keep on visiting the restaurant.
Another strength is the competitive pricing at Daruma Sushi, including the many promotions devised to attract target customers, who are office workers and those in the middle-to-upper-income income brackets, he said.
“Nowadays, there are many Japanese restaurants, which are as easy to find as noodle restaurants. Enterprises need to decide on their strengths in order to ensure business survival. Daruma Sushi has focused on the good quality of its raw materials, most of which are imported from Japan, and on setting fair and competitive prices, while we will always create new promotions and campaigns to attract customers for every special occasion,” Metha explained.
He sometimes has to shoulder a loss after launching a special promotion, but it is worth it in the long run if it keeps customers coming back to Daruma Sushi, he added.
The managing director said that over the past year, competition among Bangkok’s Japanese restaurants had been particularly intense, resulting in a sales drop-off of 15-30 per cent.
However, his restaurant business has been able to survive by always creating new promotions and new menus to attract customers.
Daruma Sushi now has three branches on the eastern side of Bangkok – at Udomsuk 50, Paradise Park and Seacon Square.
Metha plans to open two more outlets in the near future, after which the Daruma Sushi brand will be opened up for franchising, as he would like to expand his business into other areas, as well.
To open and run a restaurant business, he said entrepreneurs should not only have knowledge about food, but also know-how in business management, as unexpected problems crop up on a nearly daily basis, whether it be a matter of the fluctuating cost of raw materials and ingredients, employee issues, or something concerning customers and service.
Enterprises need to know how to manage their business and create new promotions to draw new customers, as well as holding on to repeat diners, he stressed.
Daruma Sushi has about 50 employees at its three branches.

In the US, it was common for feed companies to contract this work out to farmers. We decided to adopt a similar system in Thailand.
Under this approach, Charoen Pokphand Group would arrange funding for farmers, acting as an intermediary with banks, and do everything from providing guidance on building chicken coops to supplying feed. We would also supply vaccines to keep the birds healthy and dispatch veterinarians as needed.
Thai farmers were skeptical at first, and it took repeated visits and explanations on my part to convince them.
What I told them was this: Regardless of the market price, once the chicks reach a certain size, CP will buy them back at a preset price. At last, farmers in Sri Racha, Chonburi, a province southeast of Bangkok, were persuaded, and in 1975 they began raising large numbers of broilers for us. Despite their initial wariness, once one farmer signed a contract, many others quickly followed suit.
To ensure we could deliver large numbers of chicks to the farmers, CP built a facility for incubating eggs in 1973. At the same time, we constructed a feed plant and a factory for processing broilers into meat in Bang Na, on the outskirts of Bangkok. Because broilers were bred to be uniform in size, it was possible to process them by machine. In successfully automating this process, we resolved a problem that had plagued the poultry industry for years.

Doing it all
We also built a plant to supply ourselves with fish meal, a vital ingredient in chicken feed. Moreover, we even created a company for building chicken coops and another for transporting the broilers.
In this way, CP established a vertically integrated structure that handled every step of the chicken production process – from the upstream operation of feed supply to the downstream operation of meat processing – within Thailand.
Because the first farmers we contracted with were concentrated in Sri Racha, we built a feed plant in that area in the late 1970s. Since then, CP has aimed for “the ultimate form of vertical integration.” Our approach is to concentrate feed plants, incubating facilities, chicken farms, slaughterhouses and meat processing plants in a single region. This means chicks are hatched, raised and processed, all within a relatively small area.
CP has built three such hubs for its broiler business – one on the outskirts of Bangkok, one in central Thailand and another in northeastern Thailand. We employed the same kind of localised, integrated approach in our hog and shrimp farming businesses. This method is not only more economically efficient, it also makes it easier to trace the route food has taken to reach consumers.
Today, vertical integration has spread even further in both directions. On the upstream end, we have worked to improve corn varieties and have succeeded in creating excellent, high-yield seeds. On the downstream side, we have entered the fast-food and retail businesses to sell our group’s products directly. No other company has built such a thorough supply chain, one that reaches from the field to the dinner table.
In the course of developing our chicken business, we also brought|substantial benefits to Thai farming villages. We bought feed corn from farmers and created new jobs by setting up chicken farms and various plants. And more than anything else, we made it possible for these villages to regularly consume chicken, something that had been prohibitively expensive before.

DhaninChearavanont is chairman of the Charoen Pokphand Group.
This is the fifteenth of a 30-part series of “My Personal History” by Dhanin Chearavanont.
Reprint with permission from The Nikkei Asian Review.

Rather than continue to do everything ourselves, we decided to bring in outside experts to manage the company. Novices can only run a business for so long before its operations become too large and complex for them to handle.
The change was also intended to protect the business. My father and his brother, and later me and my brothers, had pooled our strength to help the company grow, but even so, my father worried about the possibility of family feuds.
As my brothers and I got married, he had us move out and establish our own homes. His thinking was this: It doesn’t matter how well brothers get along with each other; once they marry and start their own families, disputes are bound to arise if everyone tries to live under the same roof.

Tough talks
In companies set up by overseas Chinese, it is not uncommon for even the second and third generations of the founding family to be directly involved in their management. But there are numerous cases in which family quarrels end up ruining the business.
I decided my family had to be kept away from the management of our company. I asked my older sisters, who were also involved in the business, to step back from it. “I’m going to pay you more than the company does now,” I told them. “I want you to enjoy life more.”
Somewhat tougher was persuading my oldest brother’s wife to give up her role. From the time he started up the feed business, she had handled its finances. She had a likable character and wanted very much to continue being involved in her husband’s business. But it was for the company’s good, so I hardened my heart and explained to her that no matter how hard she worked and no matter how much she sacrificed |herself, because she was the chairman’s wife, people would always |harbour suspicions about her actions.
In this way, I convinced one family member after another to withdraw from management and replaced them with young, newly-hired professionals.
Furthermore, I forbade thechildren of any of our families from entering CP’s core business, namely agricultural and food products. |Of course, this included my own sons.
If a company has a solid management team, the business will go well. If one of the owner’s sons were to join that team, however, he would not be judged on his own merits. Even if he ran the company well, everyone would assume he had simply inherited a position at a company successfully managed by others.
Bringing a son on board could also jeopardise the company’s future. Capable members of the management team might decide to resign, feeling that their prospects for |promotion had been lost. Not only would the company lose valuable executives, it would have trouble ensuring a smooth transition from leadership to the next.
I never studied economics, but I learned from experience that a separation of ownership and management is important. Managers use their specialised knowledge to generate profits for the company, and the shareholders receive those profits. Shareholders should not be expected to help with management. Otherwise, chaos and inefficiency would ensue.
Once I had convinced my family members to become shareholders, I devoted myself to management. Because they were treated well, and because I did not try to monopolise shares myself, nobody in the family was dissatisfied with this new arrangement.
As manager, I worked harder than anyone else and was content with a decent salary and bonuses. Had I tried to usurp my bothers’ shares, they would have resented me, and society might have given me the cold shoulder.
In 1969, when I turned 30, my oldest brother told me to become president of the CP Group. In this way, the family business was reborn as a company run by experts, and my inheritance of the business was |complete. Even after this transition, I have remained on good terms with my brothers. When we meet now, we talk like old friends.

Dhanin Chearavanont is chairman of the Charoen Pokphand Group.
This is the thirteenth of a 30-part series of “My Personal History” by Dhanin Chearavanont.
Reprint with permission from The Nikkei Asian Review.

Briand Greer, president of Honeywell Southeast Asia, said yesterday that the company had invested heavily in Thailand on human and other resources to help it get a better understanding of the market and to continue expanding its market share.
Last year, its aggregate sales for Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines ran at about half a billion US dollars.
Thailand is one of the countries and regions that the company identifies as high-growth. Others are Turkey, Central Asia, the Middle East, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia, the Philippines and Africa.
They all have experienced rapid urbanisation, a significant rise in the middle class, growing demand for energy and huge investment in infrastructure.
All of these represent foundations for Honeywell’s growth.
Over the past decade, the company has tripled revenue in the high-growth regions from US$3 billion (Bt105 billion) in 2005 to $9 billion last year.
During the next five years, these high-growth regions are expected to contribute more than 60 per cent of its global growth, up from the present 55 per cent.
According to the company’s five-year business plan for Thailand, it will focus more on increasing investments in human resources and introducing more products and services that fit well with the market’s needs, Greer said.
Honeywell provides worldwide customers with a wide range of products, such as aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes and industry; and performance materials.
The company has three subsidiaries here – Honeywell Systems (Thailand), Honeywell Electronic Materials (Thailand) and Honeywell Holdings Thailand.

Processing chickens for meat was extremely labour-intensive, and we tried to automate the process by introducing plucking machines, but without success. The size of locally-grown chickens was too variable for the machines to cope with.
In the US, however, major advances in chicken breeding had been made, and a variety known as broilers was becoming popular. They could be raised for meat in just eight weeks and, most importantly, were all of a similar size.Profitable connections
CP Group had a business relationship with Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase) for the settlement of imports and exports. The American bank was kind enough to introduce us to one of its affiliates, Arbor Acres, the largest broiler breeding company in the US.
At the time, the bank was headed by David Rockefeller, a grandson of oil tycoon John Rockefeller. David’s older brother was Nelson Rockefeller, who would later become vice president under US President Gerald Ford. Nelson, an industrialist, had acquired Arbor Acres.
Around 1970, I had the chance to visit the US to observe how broilers were bred and raised. But traveling to America would not be cheap. When I talked it over with my oldest brother, Jaran, he gave me a slap on the back and said, “Go and see!”. Had he not said that, today’s CP might not exist.
After sightseeing in New York, I went to Maine. The state was the primary location for raising the birds that produce broiler chicks. Because broilers were hybrids, they could not produce a second generation of chicks. Each new crop of broilers had to come from the breeder birds.
Contract production, in which a feed company buys chicks from a breeding company and hands them over to farmers to be raised, had become an established industry |in the US. The feed company |would provide feed and medicine for the birds, and buy the chickens |back once they reached the desired size.
The variety of chick I saw grew to a weight of 1.5 kg in eight weeks. Large numbers of them could be raised even in small spaces. In those days, Thai farmers were largely limited to raising 100 chickens per household.
With these smaller broilers, a |single household would be able to raise as many as 10,000 birds. They also consumed less feed than Thai chickens.
I decided to introduce broilers |to Thailand. Arbor Acres was managed by Nelson’s son, Rodman Rockefeller. Thanks to an introduction from David Rockefeller, I was able to meet him right away. Rodman agreed to partner with CP Group in Southeast Asia.
And so, we launched a joint |venture in Thailand for raising chicks. Arbor Acres had a broiler business in India, and the first breeder birds for the Thai venture were brought over from there.
The Rockefellers later stepped away from Arbor Acres, but we maintained good relations with the family. Getting acquainted with the Rockefellers was the big reward of my trip to the US.Dhanin Chearavanont is chairman of the Charoen Pokphand Group.
This is the fourteenth of a 30-part series of “My Personal History” by Dhanin Chearavanont.
Reprint with permission from The Nikkei Asian Review.