The price of gold was unchanged in morning trade on Monday after falling by Bt100 per baht weight at close on Saturday, the Gold Traders Association reported.
As of 9.24am, the buying price of a gold bar was Bt26,250 per baht weight and selling price Bt26,350, while gold ornaments were priced at Bt25,772 and Bt26,850, respectively.
Comex (Commodity Exchange) gold price to be delivered in February dropped by US$9.7, or 0.52 per cent, closing at $1,856.2 (Bt59,702) per ounce on Friday due to the strengthening dollar which made the metal price high for investors holding other currencies.
However, the gold price had risen by 1.4 per cent last week.
Filling station operator PTG Energy Plc will roll out charging points for electric vehicles as part of its business plan this year, said vice president Rangsun Puangprang.
The first phase of the quick-charge service is set to launch early next month at five PT filling stations in major provinces, before expanding to 30 stations by the end of this year.
PTG said it will also partner with other companies to launch “ultra-charging” stations to serve large EVs such as trucks and buses.
Each ultra-charging station requires investment of Bt40 million-Bt50 million, as a plot of 5-10 rai is needed.
The company is in talks with two or three potential partners for installation of the ultra-charging systems and wants to launch the service this year.
Meanwhile PTG also plans to develop an ethanol plant with a partner at a cost of Bt100 million-Bt200 million. The plan will be clarified in the next quarter, said Rangsun.
The company currently needs about 500,000 litres of ethanol per day but forecasts it will require 800,000-1 million litres daily in the next five years.
PTG is also in talks with two partners on plans to develop the second phase of its palm-oil complex, aiming to double production of B100 biodiesel from the current 500,000 litres per day.
The second phase is expected to take 12-14 months to get off the ground.
Kasikornbank and Krungthai Bank have advised investors not to rush with their subscription to PTT Oil and Retail Business (OR) shares as it is open until February 2.
They made the statement after the subscription system of three banks, namely Kasikornbank, Krungthai Bank and Bangkok Bank, crashed at 9am on Sunday due to high user traffic.
OR has set the price of its 3-billion initial public offering (including 390 million overallotment shares) at between Bt16 and Bt18 per share, including 595.7 million shares being offered to individual investors from January 24 to February 2.
OR is using the small lot first method to ensure that individual investors would be able to receive the company’s shares. The subscription amount has been set at Bt18 per share. OR will refund the difference to subscribers if the final offering price is different from the subscription price.
The refund will be made by February 17 (in case of cash payment) or February 22 (in case of cheque payment) if shares are not allotted to subscribers.
According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the fundraising aims to support OR’s five-year expansion plan, such as increasing the number of PTT stations, fuel distribution centres, retail stores and overseas business. The company will use the funds to repay loans and invest in new businesses.
Chocolate war leaves world’s top cocoa producer stuck with beans
EconJan 24. 2021Chocolate pours into a bowl while being processed at the Auro Chocolate production facility in Calamba, Laguna province, Philippines, on Feb. 11, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Hannah Reyes Morales.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Isis Almeida, Leanne de Bassompierre
Nobody is suffering more from a global chocolate standoff than the Ivory Coast cocoa farmer.
Less than two years after the top cocoa producer teamed up with neighboring Ghana to force companies from Hershey to Nestle to pay more for their beans, the attempt to exert control over prices is backfiring. Buyers are refusing to pay up, beans are piling in warehouses upcountry and farmers are so desperate that some even slept outside the offices of Ivory Coast’s cocoa regulator demanding action.
“We have suffered with our cocoa piling up,” said Baba Kampe, a 45-year-old farmer with 8 hectares (20 acres) in Daloa who was among those sleeping outside the regulator’s offices Monday. “It has been difficult to feed our children.”
The cooperation to charge the $100 billion chocolate industry a premium of $400 per metric ton was intended to boost income for some of the world’s poorest growers, the West African nations said. But for many cocoa traders, processors and chocolate makers, it was an OPEC-style attempt to boost prices that lacked the supply-and-demand economics key to that cartel’s success.
Farmers now are paying the price. Ivory Coast and Ghana, which account for almost 70% of world supplies, expanded output just as the pandemic locked down cities from Paris to Los Angeles, hurting demand. Growers can’t sell their crop and don’t have a way to store it. Middlemen are paying less than the government’s minimum price, and Ivory Coast had to offer deep discounts to offload this season’s crop.
“The farmers are very fed up with the whole thing because they were promised this Utopian existence that wasn’t based on sound economics,” said Jonathan Parkman, deputy head of agriculture at Marex Spectron Group, who has followed cocoa for 30 years. “That doesn’t help farmers, it hinders them.”
The average West African grower farms no more than 3.5 hectares and supports six to eight family members, according to the World Cocoa Foundation industry group. More than half of Ivory Coast’s growers live below the poverty line. With no access to irrigation or modern farming techniques, they rely on the weather. But not even that matters anymore.
“What good is it to follow the weather closely and have a good harvest when there are no buyers,” said Kouadio Moussa, a 45-year-old farmer of 3.5 hectares in Anoumaba.
Chocolate is a luxury product that benefits from gifting and impulse buying. With many shopping online during the pandemic, consumers aren’t picking up that last-minute bar before reaching the cashier. Nor are they buying the assorted boxes typically given at Christmas and Valentine’s Day.
That created a global surplus and left Ivory Coast struggling to sell what’s now the world’s most expensive cocoa. Ghana is in a better position since many European chocolatiers need its high-quality beans for their premium bars. Still, European processing dropped to a four-year low in the fourth quarter.
Cocoa is the third-highest export earner for Ghana and accounts for 8% of Ivory Coast’s economy. The situation is so dire that Ivorian regulator Le Conseil du Cafe Cacao, or CCC, is mulling such drastic steps as purchasing 50,000 tons and delaying the commercialization of two-thirds of the unsold beans — or about 200,000 tons — to the smaller of two annual harvests that starts in April.
That’s bringing back memories of 1987, when Ivorian President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, faced with a bumper crop, imposed a sales embargo and struck deals with traders to store at least a quarter of the country’s output with the sole objective of pushing up prices. The strategy, recounted in the book “La Guerre du Cacao,” or “The Cocoa War,” backfired, and prices more than halved during the 18-month ban.
“Nobody in this world can guarantee a higher price for more cocoa, especially when demand is falling,” said Derek Chambers, a retired cocoa trader and a protagonist in those events. “There is brave talk of putting cocoa in store, which history tells us is a destruction of value.”
Farmers protested Monday outside CCC offices in the towns of Soubre, Daloa and Yamoussoukro. Growers are stuck with 200,000 tons of beans, and middlemen are offering to buy cocoa at 800-850 CFA francs ($1.48-$1.57) a kilogram, lower than the 1,000 CFA francs the government promised.
The chocolate industry has been under pressure for its failure to fight child labor and its role in perpetuating poverty in West Africa. Growers need to receive about $3,100 a ton, compared with $1,800 now, said Antonie Fountain, managing director at the Voice Network.
“We need regulation,” he said. “For the last two decades, we’ve been focusing on getting farmers to solve the problems that they are faced with, but the fact is that the farmer isn’t the problem, the system is the problem.”
Yves Kone, the CCC’s managing director, took to national TV last week to warn against “unscrupulous buyers” taking advantage of the situation to pay farmers less. He blamed the pandemic and difficulties in securing shipping containers for the industry woes.
“The pandemic is hitting the economy as a whole,” Kone said. “Cocoa is no exception.”
Chocolate makers and cocoa processors have been trying to cut costs. Hershey last year sourced a large amount of beans through the New York futures market, where beans were cheaper than in the physical market. The company denied it was skirting the West African premium, called the Living Income Differential.
Ivory Coast has recently sold cocoa at deep discounts, according to traders with direct knowledge of the matter. While the LID remained in place, a premium paid for the quality was replaced with a discount of as much as 150 pounds ($205) a ton — a figure Kone denies.
“You could almost argue the LID is already dead,” Marex’s Parkman said.
Even before the coronavirus upended global markets, industry experts warned that Ivory Coast and Ghana’s approach was doomed because higher prices were going to result in overproduction.
“The way this will end? Ivory Coast will realize they can’t sell all the cocoa they produce at a premium of $400 a ton,” said Chambers, who spent 50 years trading before retiring from Paris-based Sucres et Denrees in 2018. “It’s unfortunate that they tried to do this at this point, but it was always going to fail.”
CIMB Thai Bank appoints Paul Wong as new president and CEO
Jan 22. 2021Paul Wong Chee Kin
By The Nation
CIMB Thai Bank on Friday announced the appointment of Paul Wong Chee Kin as its president and CEO, effective from February 1.
He succeeds Sutee Losoponkul, who took over as acting president and CEO in September last year following the departure of the previous CEO, Adisorn Sermchaiwong.
Sutee will remain with CIMB Thai and assume the role of adviser to the president and CEO, effective February 1. CIMB Group said the appointments have been approved by the Bank of Thailand.
Wong is currently CIMB’s group chief operations officer, overseeing activities across functions in the areas of payments and digitalisation as well as strategy, customer delivery and process improvements.
Thai Vietjet ties up with MSIG to provide Covid-19 coverage for domestic fliers
Jan 22. 2021
By The Nation
In a bid to boost travellers’ confidence in safety, Thai Vietjet is cooperating with MSIG Insurance to launch “Trip Easy Plus” travel insurance, which also provides Covid-19 coverage.
The Trip Easy Plus scheme is offered to passengers travelling on the airline’s domestic network. Passengers will be insured for up to Bt1 million, including accident medical expenses and evacuation coverage, loss or damage to baggage, coverage for flight delays, and most importantly, coverage for medical expenses related to Covid-19 infections.
The Covid-19 coverage will last for 30 days from the date of travel with terms and conditions applied.
Apart from Trip Easy Plus, the airline and MSIG are also offering other packages, including Cancer Fix, with the sum insured up to Bt500,000, and Seasonal Disease Insurance, which covers 30 days of hospitalisation and medical expenses for in- and out-patient treatments for seasonal diseases.
Banpu NEXT has teamed up with the municipalities of Phuket City and Rawai, as well as the Phuket Old Town Community and Planet Communications Asia to drive forward the first phase of the “Phuket Liveable City, Smart and Safe” project.
By integrating smart data analytics solutions, this new move will help upgrade safety standards in the new normal in three key areas, namely disease, crime and environmental threats.
So far, safety systems have been installed in two neighbourhoods, namely Thalang Road connecting Rommanee Alley, and Rawai sub-district (Municipality Office and Promthep Cape).
This is the first development in Thailand to use AI-driven smart community platform and application for data collection, analysis and processing to give communities peace of mind.
Other solutions will also be introduced to turn Phuket into a model city with multidimensional smart city developments.
Somruedee Chaimongkol, chief executive officer of Banpu PCL and Banpu NEXT, said Banpu NEXT has developed five smart energy solutions, namely smart energy analytics, smart energy generation, smart energy storage, smart energy utilisation and smart circular economy to allow for tangible results.
“We started off by introducing smart energy utilisation solutions to e-ferries and charging stations for marine tourism in Phuket. More recently, we have partnered with government and private organisations as well as local communities in the ‘Phuket Liveable City, Smart and Safe’ project that uses ‘Smart Data Analytics Solution’ to analyse data of the locations and design safety systems that address the issues. The system installation, including hardware, software and IoT-based operating system, was completed by Planet.”
The smart community app allows 24/7 monitoring, inspection and proper control from anywhere. These systems will also increase Covid-19 monitoring and control efficiency on social distancing measures with five capabilities: limiting visitor traffic, monitoring occupancy density, body temperature screening; detection of non-maskers; and preliminary timeline analysis of visitors and inspection of potential Covid-19 patients.
Officials can use the application to track the data, send out real-time notifications if any risk is found.
Harald Link, chairman of B Grimm Power Group (BGRIM) has bought back 2 million company shares for Bt139 million at Bt69.50 per share, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) information.
BGRIM’s December share price was Bt48.50, down 1.52 per cent, after ranging between Bt47.25 and Bt53. This month it has risen 12.63 per cent to Bt53.50, ranging between Bt47.50 and Bt56.
On January 12, BGRIM announced it had invested 45 per cent in Univenture BGP (UVBGP), a subsidiary of SET-listed property developer Univentures Plc (UV), with the aim of investing, developing and operating energy projects together with UV.
BGRIM acquired 2.25 million newly issued ordinary shares in UVBGP at a subscription price of Bt10 per share, totalling Bt22.5 million.
BGRIM and UV now hold 45 per cent and 55 per cent, respectively, of the total number of voting shares in UVBGP.
BGRIM currently operates 48 power plants with total capacity of 3,058MW and plans to raise that figure to 7,200MW by 2025.
The Department of Airports is launching measures to ease financial impacts on airlines following the latest Covid-19 outbreak, said acting director-general Apirat Chaiwongnoi.
The department will cut both landing and parking fees by 50 per cent for domestic and international flights. The measure will be effective for one month, from February 1-28.
It will also extend the cut in shop rental fees at its airports to March 31.
Apirat said the moves were in line with Transport Minister Saksayam Chidchob’s policy of seeking measures to help airlines combat financial fallout from the outbreak.
The Thai automotive industry is bracing for impact after the Philippines imposed temporary import duties on cars and pickup trucks to protect its own automotive sector.
Duties on imported passenger cars and pickup trucks worth US$1,500 and $2,300 per vehicle, respectively, have been imposed until August 8 this year, said Pisit Rangsaritwutikul, president of Thailand Automotive Institute.
The Philippines is Thailand’s third-largest export market for cars and second-largest for pickup trucks.
The private sector in the Philippines is worried the new duties will push up the price of vehicles, since its domestic auto industry is still unable to meet local demand.
Thai auto production soared in November last year to 172,455 vehicles, its first rise in 19 months as domestic and export markets recovered from the Covid-19 crisis. The first 11 months of 2020 saw almost 1.3 million vehicles produced in Thailand.
But the second wave of Covid-19 in Europe and Thailand, coupled with political uncertainty in the US, then sparked concern over domestic and export markets for Thai autos. However, signs of recovery in the Australian and Thai markets have spurred hopes that production of vehicles in Thailand this year will be close to the targeted 1.4 million.
Chocolate pours into a bowl while being processed at the Auro Chocolate production facility in Calamba, Laguna province, Philippines, on Feb. 11, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Hannah Reyes Morales.
Paul Wong Chee Kin
Harald Link
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