The company says it has joined its business partners to set up Microsoft Experience Zones for customers and it will also set up an Internet of Things (IoT) Centre of Excellence by the end of this year.
Orapong Thien-Ngern, general manager at Microsoft (Thailand), said the firm would drive the business towards digital transformation to improve productivity, identify customers, improve operation process management, and improve services.
The digital transformation will focus on four areas: engaging customers, empowering employees, optimising business, and transforming products and business.
At all organisational levels, the company will support the IoT platform, Microsoft cognitive services, its intelligent cloud platform and cybersecurity. It will provide technologies, solutions and platforms to help businesses to improve efficiency and productivity.
Orapong said the company, along with its business partners, would set up an IoT Centre of Excellence in the next couple of months to provide a platform for proof of concept and prototypes for businesses that want to develop projects.
“I think that our new vision will drive Thailand onwards to success in the digital-transformation journey across all dimensions of development. It will boost Thailand’s capability for innovation, reinforce competitiveness across the business sector, develop next-generation talent and open opportunities for all to harness the true potential of digital technologies in creative, constructive and secure ways,” he said.
The digital transformation will enable small and medium-sized enterprises to create new products and services productively and efficiently.
The Board of Investment has reported that SMEs last year made up 99.7 per cent of the companies in the Thai economy and accounted for 80.3 per cent of total employment. SMEs also accounted for more than 42 per cent of Thailand’s gross domestic product.
However, providers of financial, retail and consumer products, manufacturers and telecom firms are the top-spending sectors for Microsoft’s business and revenue. They are also the first groups that will undergo digital transformation.
Ekaraj Panjavinin, country lead for the consumer group at Microsoft (Thailand), said the firm planned to set up Microsoft Experience Zones in five locations, including CentralWorld and Mega Bangna.
“We continue to invest heavily in researching and developing new technologies for customers – from Windows 10 as a service, Azure IoT, and intelligent cloud applications to the establishment of a new research department focusing on artificial intelligence – so that people and organisations can achieve more in the mobile-first and cloud-first world,” he said.
He added that the had also also announced its new SMEs IT Pack campaign, which offers 1,000 gigabytes of storage space in the cloud for an affordable price.

Thiraphong Chansiri, chief executive officer of Thai Union, said yesterday the move would pave the way for the company to learn more about the restaurant business and restaurant management. The acquisition fits well with the company’s strategy to continue to expand into areas related to its core seafood business.
He said the company expected to take two to three years to gain more insight into this business.
Red Lobster, which is headquartered in Orlando, Florida, has 58,000 employees in more than 700 restaurants in the United States and Canada, and a growing international footprint, including 24 branches in Japan and seven in Malaysia.
Thai Union has supplied seafood to Red Lobster for more than two decades.
In the 12 months to August 2016, Red Lobster generated sales of $2.479 billion.
Of TU’s total investment in this deal, $230 million was spent on acquiring 25 per cent of the shares of Red Lobster held by its former 100-per-cent owner Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco-based private-equity investment firm.
Another $345 million was spent purchasing convertible preferred units in Red Lobster from Golden Gate, which resulted in Thai Union acquiring another 24 per cent of Red Lobster. With this part of the deal, TU has an option either to redeem these convertible units at the agreed amount or convert them into common units at any time before the end of the 10-year tenure.
Golden Gate remains the majority owner and retains operational control of Red Lobster.
“This investment marks a strategic step to build Thai Union’s direct-to-consumer channel, and will enable us to benefit from the extensive restaurant-industry expertise of both the Red Lobster management team and Golden Gate,” Thiraphong said.
Thai Union owns a number of global seafood brands, including Chicken of the Sea, King Oscar, John West and Petit Navire.
He said the acquisition of a stake in Red Lobster was TU’s biggest deal this year. Before the Red Lobster deal, this year TU had spent about $73 million on business expansion.
Thai Union obtained six-month bridge loans totalling more than Bt20 billion from Bangkok Bank, Siam Commercial Bank and Bank of Ayudhya to fund the Red Lobster deal.
The company is considering issuing debentures and seeking long-term bank loans this year to refinance the bridge loans.

Ms Chen encouraged me at a time when I had few friends, having just moved to China from Thailand. At her suggestion, I got up in front of the class and told them about Thai folk tales. My classmates burst out laughing at the amusing stories and promptly opened their hearts to me.
Having graduated teaching school, Ms Chen was then in her late 20s. Her husband taught at a middle school in Jieyang, around 30 km from Swatow. When I became sick and had to be hospitalised, she came to check on me. During that summer break, she didn’t go back to Jieyang but stayed in Swatow to help me catch up on all the lessons I’d missed.
Ms Chen treated not just me but all of the students kindly and without favoritism. She never took days off, even when she was sick. One time when she caught a cold, my classmates and I visited the lodging house where she lived and helped with her housework. I also gave her some medicine I had brought from Thailand.

Learning to lead
Our teacher worried about students who couldn’t keep up with lessons and proposed that everyone in the class help tutor those with poor marks. I invited a number of classmates to my home for study sessions. Some students didn’t have electricity at home, making it difficult for them to study once night fell. My home not only had electricity but also a large room where we all could gather.
For the study sessions, each of us would choose a different topic to teach the others so we could cover a broad range of subjects. This approach encouraged everyone to take an active interest in studying. My classmates would spend the night at my house and rise early the next morning, reciting passages from textbooks from memory. Even the marks of under-achieving students improved, and our class became the most academically successful in the entire school.
I also ended up being the leader when our class competed against others in basketball or games of tug-of-war. I came up with strategies to help us win, and then we all pooled our strength to turn those plans into victory. Although still young, I came to understand the pleasure of motivating a group. I was even elected class president.
One thing I’ll never forget is becoming friends with an unpopular boy. He had no friends, and even his parents didn’t spend time with him. Lacking affection, he tried to get attention by repeatedly misbehaving.
I understood how he was feeling. I became his only friend and nudged him, little by little, to change his behaviour. He eventually started listening to what I said, even though his parents or teachers couldn’t get through to him.
I inherited my mother’s compassion and consideration for other people’s feelings. This became a great asset later in managing a company: If you put yourself in other people’s shoes and consider how they are feeling, they’ll follow you. If you simply try to force your own views on them, they won’t listen.

Moving on
I attended school in Swatow until my first year of middle school. Partway through that year, I transferred to a middle school in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province. My older sister was attending a university there, and I lived with her.
In Guangzhou, I suddenly had to use Cantonese in my daily life. Although both the Chaozhou dialect and Cantonese originated in the province of Guangdong, the pronunciations of the two are so different they may as well be foreign languages. At first, I couldn’t understand what people were saying unless I saw the Chinese characters. I was never able to speak Cantonese myself.
I left the middle school in Guangzhou after just a year, without graduating. That was because I was going to attend school in Hong Kong to study English.

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

Located on the third, fourth and fifth floors of CW Tower on Ratchadaphisek Road in Bangkok, Horeca Square will occupy 12,000 square metres.
The project aims to be a platform for knowledge centres and business networking for entrepreneurs striving for sustainable growth in their businesses.
So far, 60 per cent of the area has been booked by tenants. There will be a number of products in the wholesale shopping mall ranging from household and electrical appliances to equipment and appliances for hotels, as well as kitchen equipment.
Pongsak Nantawannakul, a member of the executive committee of Asia Horeca, said the company was spending about Bt100 million to Bt200 million on design, renovation, marketing and products to be displayed at the mall, which is scheduled to be in operation early next year.
TCC Assets’ Horeca business group, founded in 2014, includes hotels, restaurants, cafes and catering services.
The total value of the market served by the Horeca business group is about Bt1 trillion per year.
The hotel segment alone is worth up to Bt527 billion, followed by the restaurant group at Bt385 billion, and the coffee, ice-cream, bakery and catering group at Bt62 billion.
According to the company’s statistics, there now are 14,178 lodging businesses and 622,123 hotel rooms in Thailand, up 10.02 per cent from last year. Most of the growth is in the resort business, followed by the hotel business. The rise is expected to continue because of the increase in the number of tourists, both domestic and international. Last year, around 30 million people visited Thailand, generating Bt1.3 trillion in revenue.

Brand-building
Pongsak said that in the first three years of the new mall’s operations, the company would concentrate on building its brand awareness. After that, the company wants to seek further opportunities to expand this business model to other key tourist destinations such as Chiang Mai, Phuket and Udon Thani.
Ladda Mongkolchaivivat, managing director of Asia Horeca, said the company would emphasise an omni-marketing strategy, including arranging a “Horeca Exposition” and e-commerce next year as well as overseas promotion.
The company targets trading value of up to Bt182.5 million in the first operational year.
In the first year, she expects more than 180,000 visitors to the mall.
Asia Horeca was formed under Bt215 million in registered capital and is wholly owned by TCC Assets, a member of TCC Group, the business empire of tycoon Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi.