At present, Asean’s online retail market is worth US$15 billion (Bt528 billion). In Thailand, the value of this market is around $2 billion. In terms of e-commerce, Thailand ranks No 4 in Asean behind Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, Punnamas said.

Seubsakol said the global online-shopping industry had been growing by 1 per cent every month while Asean’s was growing at double that rate. In Thailand, online shopping now accounts for 2.3 per cent of the total retail-market value. However, the online-shopping growth rate for developed nations ranges between 10 and 12 per cent, signifying that Thailand’s online market has tremendous opportunities.

He said WeMall would focus on end-to-end services and promote its market position as the branded marketplace with trusted mechanics for online shoppers to make direct purchases.

“On WeMall’s ties with brands, there are two forms of partnerships. The first involves full-scale services, while the other is self-formulated services.

“At WeMall, brands can run their own online outlets via various ready-to-use features. All these features are designed to ensure that brands can conveniently and speedily manage their online shops. When the business climate turns increasingly competitive, they will be able to adjust their strategy in a timely manner.

“Experts at WeMall are on hand to provide online-marketing consultancy to help brands bolster their digital-marketing strategies. Partners of WeMall also get the efficient back-office system that is behind iTrueMart’s e-commerce success.

“WeMall has been running trial services during the past month. Over the period, this online plaza has attracted more than 2 million visitors, or in other words about 100,000 visitors a day. In just one month, more than 60,000 products have been sold and delivered.

“In its pivotal phase, WeMall features more than 15,000 items from more than 1,100 brands in nine main product categories: beauty and healthcare; home appliances; electronic devices; computers and laptops; lifestyle; mums, kids and babies; cellphones and tablets; and cameras and gadgets,” Seubsakol said.

Her company posted a revenue drop of 7.6 per cent to Bt371.65 million in the first quarter.

Rarin has told the media that her company targets 10-per-cent growth in revenue this year by expanding digital ad media, selling pocketbooks and organising on-ground activities and fairs.

Under this year’s omni-media strategy, the company will offer content development for its clients and advertisers on top of publicising their brands and products.

It will also organise events to support their sales promotions to engage directly with end consumers.

This strategy was created to respond to new, sophisticated demand from clients in managing their advertising budgets via various media channels.

“Nowadays, we are witnessing an increase in clients wanting to spend their ad budgets via multimedia platforms. More than half of all ad spenders require more than one medium for their marketing campaigns with the company,” she said.

Organising on-ground activities will continue to be key for this year and in 2017. Next year, the company is planning to expand the size of main events.

“We believe that there is more room to grow in this show business because our clients are keen on using fairs and consumer shows as key platforms and distribution channels to sell their products on top of promoting brand awareness,” Rarin said.

Next year, the company will organise at least 10 shows, up from eight this year.

Besides further investing in the show business, the company plans to add 10 Naiin bookstores this year at a cost of about Bt2 million to Bt3 million each.

He pointed to Dutch Mill, Nescafe, Colgate and Breeze as examples of brands that were successful in building trust last year when the Thai economy was struggling.

Those brands were ranked at the top of their respective key-product categories, according to Kantar Worldpanel’s 2015 “Brand Footprint Report”. Nescafe was No 1 in the beverage category, Dutch Mill milk in the food category, Colgate toothpaste in health and beauty products, and Breeze detergent in consumer products. In the retail business category, 7-Eleven was the top choice.

Chang said the report was based on a survey last year of 4,000 households. Apart of the population factor, the market research firm also took product penetration and frequency of purchase into account.

The company found that another implication in Thai market was that local brands had fast recovered despite hard hitting from negative conditions recently.

Supachramanee Srivali, marketing director of Dutch Mill, one of Thailand’s largest dairy producers, said the company had to adapt its business direction and strategy to changes in the market, particularly a digitised ecosystem.

“We have to learn how to use and analyse consumer insight for product development and communication strategic planning. Big data is key to dealing with the challenges ahead,” she said.

The 7-Eleven brand is another case reflecting that retailers should understand changes in market situations and consumer behaviour.

Yuthasak Poomsurakul, senior vice president for marketing and merchandising at CP All, the operator of 7-Eleven stores, acknowledged that the chain’s more than 9,000 branches nationwide must act as a bridge between brands and suppliers and consumers in each location.

“We have to be ready for changes in population demography. What is the prominent group in the market? How do we provide the right products for the right consumers in the right location?” he explained.

Apart from understanding consumer insight, the company continues to establish new branches along with conducting employee training. Having its own distribution centre is another key.

Today, Asia Pacific-headquartered companies account for 40 per cent of the firms in the Fortune Global 500, outnumbering those headquartered either in North America (30 per cent) or in Europe (28 per cent). This represents a significant growth from 10 years ago, when they comprised only 24 per cent of the ranking.

Willis Towers Watson’s 2016 Asian Trailblazers Study: Masters of Multitasking and Transformation found that Asian multinationals, to achieve success, have had to overcome substantial odds, including significant barriers to time, lack of experience, and managing highly divergent cultures.

“These multinationals have had amazing and sometimes unconventional growth stories,” said Scott Burnett, head of Asia at Willis Towers Watson. “They have not had the luxury of time nor been able to grow in an orderly and linear fashion like many of their global counterparts. We call them ‘Asian Trailblazers’ in recognition of their pioneering spirit. They’ve had to venture into the unknown, and have made up for lost time by being pragmatic and agile, prioritising, selectively outsourcing, and learning quickly on the job.”

Main challenges

“In Southeast Asia, Thailand’s MNCs tend to get insular, and find it more difficult to adapt to change and to think outside the box due to the national culture,” said Pichpajee Saichuae, managing director of Willis Towers Watson Thailand. “While Thai MNCs have successfully expanded their businesses abroad, there is plenty of room for improvement in terms of having a diverse leadership. On the other hand, their peers from the Philippines – a very culturally diverse country – hire the best talent from wherever it is available and focus more on qualifications than origin. And they reap the benefits of having a multilingual culture.”

In five Southeast Asian countries – Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam – there are at least two very large and important MNCs that have embarked on a 360-degree transformation towards becoming global. Some of these MNCs’ CEOs have been vocal about the fact that to become truly global, they have to overcome part of the challenges posed by their cultural DNA.

Cultural distance for Southeast Asian MNCs involves more than English language barriers. The largest clash exists in terms of leadership and working style. Organisational culture in these multinationals is highly correlated with national culture and firms have realised that this is directly affecting their ability to succeed as global players.

Apart from the cultural issues, the research revealed that many Southeast Asian multinationals typically started as family-owned businesses, and are now dealing with second- and third-generation leaders that have different business training and ambitions from their predecessors.

Leapfrogging

The study found that one of the ways that Asian multinationals are handling this pace of change is by “leapfrogging” some of the basic changes undertaken by their more developed counterparts, and making radical moves early on.

For instance, in terms of shared service models for support functions, many fast-growing Asian Trailblazers are not setting up traditional bricks-and-mortar call centres, instead choosing to bypass this earlier stage of HR development and avoid obsolete systems, switching directly to mobile-technology-enabled ones.

Furthermore, many Asian Trailbla-zers have also skipped several traditional elements of certain HR roles and jumped directly to a more strategic role, such as using workforce analytics, focusing on employee engagement or developing holistic wellness programmes.

“Asian MNCs have been surprisingly successful in sustaining their growth despite having smaller HR teams with fewer resources, compared to their developed-market counterparts,” said Burnett. “In the West, most large corporations have departments with experts handling areas like rewards or talent management, compensation and benefits, and so on.”

“These Asian corporations usually have just one or two key people handling all HR-related issues. Since they are used to dealing with multiple issues simultaneously, these HR executives have the advantage of being flexible and highly-equipped to face unexpected challenges.”

“The Marketing Association of Thailand is [operating] traditionally as it has done over the last 30 years, just hosting marketing seminars and talking about 4P initiatives [product, price, place and promotion]. They should help the government’s Pracha Rath project in providing start-ups with good marketing practices,” Somkid said.

Supattra Paopiamsap, chief executive of the Unilever Thai Group of Companies and president of the Marketing Association of Thailand, declined to comment.

Somkid yesterday chaired the opening of a forum titled “Mobilising Collective Action to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of a Zero Carbon, Zero Poverty World” held by Unilever, in cooperation with the Federation of Thai Industries and online news organisation Thai Publica.

He said Pracha Rath means close coordination between the government, private and people sectors in moving the country forward for sustainable growth and development.

“Pracha Rath itself is not a new idea. It is a joint working between the government, the private and people sectors to move the country forward,” said Somkid.

He said that with sustainable development, Thailand would not be run only on the basis of GDP growth and an export-driven economy.

“Focusing only on economic growth will lead to many problems for the country, including poverty and inequality in society, as well as natural disasters. Such a society will not last long,” said Somkid.

Somkid added that the country and all stakeholders must prioritise sustainable development, which will cover three dimensions – economy, society and the environment.

For the Pracha Rath project, which will promote sustainable development of the country, the government will focus on three key dimensions: 1) increase income and reduce expenditure of people; 2) shift the country from an export economy to make it competitive; 3) promote good governance, especially in government projects.

Suphachai Chearavanont, president and CEO of True Corporation, said the group has been supporting the Pracha Rath project in promoting and developing a strong foundation for the country’s education system.

“We have already signed MoUs with 12 private organisations to grant support in areas of personnel and investment capital to 3,300 schools throughout the country. And if the project is running successfully, we plan to increase the number of schools being supported to 7,400 within the next three years, covering all tambons [sub-districts] throughout the country,” he said.

Suphachai said that the collaboration would cover the sharing of knowledge, promoting good governance and developing new leaderships at the school level. They will be changed from a teacher-centric to a child-centric learning system, which will allow children the ability to question, find answers, and make them capable of analysis and execution.

He said that True Corp, two years ago, set up a US$10-million fund called ‘True Incube” to support start-ups in the area of digital technology. The fund will now be expanded to between $30-50 million within the next three to five years.

“In addition to digital technology, we plan to set up funds to promote local and regional start-ups in areas of bio food technology, nano technology, and robotic technology. The move will attract regional talents to Thailand,” said Supachai.

Unilever recently joined the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI), online news organisation Thai Publica, and representatives from 32 public, private, and non-governmental organisations for a symposium to exchange ideas on reducing obstacles for sustainable businesses and build new partnerships to help businesses better tackle Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations.

The establishment of the SDGs by the UN and the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change (COP 21) by 193 countries from across the world, including Thailand, brought sustainable development and addressing climate change to the forefront as key challenges for every sector to achieve by 2030

A telecom-industry observer said the new rates, if adopted, were expected to reduce the revenue of telecom operators by 10 per cent on average.

According to the new rates, the voice-call rate on 2.1-gigahertz service must not exceed 82 satang per minute, and data fees must not exceed 28 satang per megabyte. The call rate for service on the 1,800- and 900-megahertz spectra must be lower than 69 satang per minute and data fees lower than 26 satang per megabyte.

The planned rates will be applied to all promotional packages and the operators will have to bill them on a per-second basis.

The NBTC’s existing tariffs are similar to the new planned rates. But the difference is that these new rates will be applied to each package the operators offer, while the existing rates are the average rates of all packages.

Chakkrit Urairat, deputy director of regulatory affairs at True Corp, said more than half of the company’s existing subscribers would be affected by the planned new rates, as it would have to launch new promotional packages to comply with them, which in some cases might have higher charges than the existing ones.

The three operators yesterday separately issued press releases of their opinions on the planned rates. According to True’s statement, the planned rates do not provide diverse choices to consumers and fail to comply with the mechanisms of competition in the liberalised market.

Narupon Rattanasamaharn, Total Access Communication’s senior vice president and head of its regulatory division, said DTAC did not agree with the new rates as they would result in a lack of package diversity.

It its statement, DTAC suggested that the regulator consider the balance of interests between service operators and subscribers. Operators have to keep expanding their networks and improving their services, including the ecosystem of the mobile-phone industry based on fair competition.

In Thailand, the competition in the mobile-phone market is very intense, so operators need to offer a variety of service packages to serve customers’ needs appropriately, DTAC said. Meanwhile in other countries with the same level of competition as Thailand, there is no service-rate regulation. They let the price mechanism freely play a big role, such as in the European Union or even some Aseancountries.

Moreover, the service rates in Thailand are among the lowest in Asean, it said.

An Advanced Info Service representative said that as the regulator, the NBTC should consider consumer benefits by not launching new rates without conducting a suitable feasibility study first. This would affect all users, as they might get stuck with new packages they may not desire.

Meanwhile, some consumer groups have reportedly welcomed the planned new rates, which they believe would lower users’ tariffs.

Takorn Tantasith, secretary-general of the NBTC, said the commission would collect information on the issue and make a proposal to the telecom committee soon.