Saran Phaloprakarn, senior vice president for fixed broadband business |management at AIS, said only 6 million of the country’s 20 million households were currently connected with fixed-line broadband, so the market had high potential.

“Five million of the 6 million households connected with fixed broadband Internet are on ADSL technology, which is old and becoming obsolete. Fibre is the new technology that can get users online with high-speed Internet connections which [enhance] users’ experience with rich online content and applications,” Saran said.

He said fixed-line broadband would be fundamental to new business and new revenue streams.

As a newcomer in this market, AIS initially aims to be in the top three within three years, with almost a million subscribers in 2017. It also aims to have 3 million subscribers in five years to become the market leader.

To achieve these goals, Saran said AIS’s strategy was to cross sales with its post-paid telecom subscribers, who currently number more than 5 million.

“AIS’s post-paid subscribers will get a 10-per-cent discount per month as long as they remain our post-paid subscribers. New post-paid subscribers will also get the privilege,” he said.

AIS yesterday also unveiled a new strategy to capture more AIS Fibre subscribers with the prepaid model.

Initially, AIS collaborated with 20 dormitories with 4,700 units near universities to offer a prepaid fixed-line broadband service called AIS Fibre Dorm Net.

It aims to provide AIS Fibre to 900 buildings before the end of the year, which is counted as around 40,000 subscribers.

“This year, we expect AIS Fibre will have 400,000 subscribers, and around 10 per cent, or 40,000 subscribers, will be on the prepaid service,” Saran said.

AIS Fibre is available in three packages: Bt590 per month for 15/5 megabits per second, Bt750 per month for 20/7mbps, and Bt888 per month for 50/10mbps.

“In the future, we might have bundled packages between mobile and fixed broadband service,” Saran said.

“Thailand’s market has high potential and growth for the medical-devices segment. We also decided to establish a company in Thailand named Apex Medical Thailand via a joint venture with our distributor here,” company founder Daniel Lee said yesterday.

Apex medical devices were launched in Thailand about 20 years ago by Samaphan International Co.

Apex Medical Thailand, which is 49:51 owned by Apex and Samaphan, just started operating as Apex’s subsidiary in Thailand early this year.

The company says it is confident of hitting its annual sales target of Bt100 million within three years, as Thailand is a huge market for medical devices with sales of some Bt10 billion in all categories.

The country is well positioned geographically to be a regional hub, something supported by government policy, and it is an ageing society. So there are good reasons for Apex having its own profile here.

Apex is the market leader in Taiwan and distributes to 60 countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

It has subsidiaries in Britain, Spain, France, the United States, Panama, Egypt, Greater China including Shanghai, and now Thailand.

“We need to serve all of Thailand’s medical-device markets with good services, both sales and after-sales,” Lee said.

“Apex Medical Thailand will be our regional headquarters for North Asia in three to five years and needs to gain more market share.

“CLMV is an emerging market for every company to focus on. AEC [the Asean Economic Community] is a good opportunity for us in the future.”

Chinnakarn Samalapa, managing director of Samaphan International and Samaphan Health, said that while 20 years ago all products from Apex Medical Corp were imported by Samaphan International and distributed over the counter, the Thai market had high potential and grew every year, so Samaphan formed a joint venture with Apex Medical Corporation.

“We need to focus on the hospital channel and serve them with professional sales consultants, product knowledge and after-sales service.

“In the future we plan to penetrate the CLMV market.

“In the past we had only distribution, but from now on we’ll focus on after-sales service.

“The main market is the hospital channel. We will serve them with product knowledge and high-quality products.

“The medical-devices segment is highly competitive and in the same product line we have around 10 competitors, but we are confident that the quality of our products is high and can compete in the market. And all products have got US FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval and the CE Mark.”

The product pipeline is focused on two categories — air mattresses for wound management and CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) devices for respiratory therapy.

AIS subsidiary Advanced Wireless Network (AWN) is the only bidder for the re-auction.

The joint-trial commercial service between AIS and TOT will last for six months, after which they will sign other related contracts as part of their partnership to provide the 3G service on TOT’s 2.1 gigahertz.

In March, AIS and TOT signed a memorandum of understanding as the first part of an agreement for TOT to gain Bt10 billion a year for a 10-year partnership covering the 2.1GHz spectrum, telecom towers and the 900MHz network.

The MoU covers only the trial-service offering on the 2.1GHz spectrum without the payment condition

AIS currently holds 15MHz of the licensed 2.1GHz spectrum and 15MHz of the licensed 1800MHz spectrum.

True Corp chief executive officer Suphachai Chearavanont said it was not beyond True’s expectation that in the end AIS would be able to grab the 900MHz licence.

However, True has a bigger spectrum portfolio than its rivals, he said.

True has a total of 55MHz bandwidth, comprising 15MHz of the 2.1GHz spectrum, 15MHz of the 1800MHz spectrum, and 10MHz of the 900MHz spectrum. It also has partnered with CAT Telecom to offer a 3G service on 15MHz of CAT’s 850MHz spectrum.

Given the 900MHz spectrum AWN will grab from the re-auction is adjacent to DTAC’s 850MHz frequency, AWN will be able to use only 7.5MHz out of the 10MHz total of this band.

The remaining 2.5MHz must be technically reserved as a “guard band” to prevent any frequency interference between AWN and DTAC.

However, an AIS source said that the company was ready to invest to technically enable it to fully utilise the 10MHz of 900MHz and might seek a network collaboration with DTAC to achieve this goal.

Earlier True chief finance officer Noppadol Dej-udom said that True would become the No 2 player in terms of revenue market share within three years.

According to a telecom analyst, as of the first quarter last year AIS had 50.5 per cent of the overall revenue market, while DTAC had 27.5 per cent and True had 22 per cent.

He said although data scientists received good salaries, their work tended to be quite technical and they often lacked the ability to interpret data to find business opportunities.

Commenting on Harvard Business School’s recent opening of its start-up hub in New York, Assad said universities had tried this approach since several years ago though under different names such as an entrepreneurship hub or incubator.

“There is more emphasis today because people look at start-ups as ones that help creating jobs. Business schools are offering more entrepreneurial courses. Universities’ strategies now move heavily toward innovations and entrepreneurship,” he said.

Assad said since MBA degrees had become standardised with most schools doing small variations of the same thing, one of |business schools’ biggest challenges was finding a value proposition to make themselves distinctive in order to recruit the best students.

He said with the constant changes in businesses, universities could no longer just provide a “set of information” to their students, rather than to give them a “way of thinking” and the ability to deal with “unstructured situations”.

Because of this, experience-based learning had increasingly played role in business schools’ curriculum as well as the so-called executives-in-residence programmes designed to give students maximum exposure to real-world business executives.

John T Delaney, dean of Emeritus and professor of Business Administration at Pitt Business, the University of Pittsburgh, said students did not want a “cook book” since there was no single answer for all situations.

The two US professors spoke to The Nation during a visit to Bangkok to meet Pitt Business alumni. Delaney begins his stint as dean of American University’s Kogod School of Business on July 18.

He said Thailand’s close proximity to large economies including India and the recent opening up of Myanmar, plus the Kingdom’s strong agricultural sector, gave it a good opportunity to grow.

Prin Chirathivat, deputy group chief executive officer, said that a Thai bank had advanced a bridging loan of more than Bt10 billion to support the acquisition of Big C in Vietnam.

The group would convert the loan to a long-term loan to restructure its financial burden, Prin said.

Vietnam was now shaping up as a second home for Central, he said.

The growing Vietnamese economy has been supported by the huge purchasing power of its people and there were several businesses there Central could buy, unlike Indonesia, another investment destination of the Central Group, he said.

“In Indonesia, we don’t have opportunity to acquire retail businesses because there are no sellers unlike in Vietnam. Our expansion in Indonesia is slower than in Vietnam,” he added.

Central Group had many businesses that had yet to penetrate the country such as food, property development and hotel businesses.

Meanwhile, it will use Zalora to strengthen the channels of its local partner Nguyen Kim and Central Marketing Group (CMG)’s unit in Robins.

Asked about the possibility of opening a Central Department Store in Vietnam to cash in on the growth of middle income Vietnamese, Prin said while that could happen, it was not likely anytime soon.

The decision to ease its buying spree in Vietnam came because the group considered it time to reap profit from its businesses there, saying that despite the positive cash flow, the depreciation of fixed assets was enough to pressure profitability.

He said the group would bring the best practices and strengths of the group in Thailand to Big C in Vietnam.

In Thailand, Central Group recently disposed of its entire stake in Big C Supercentre after Berli Jucker, a business unit of the TCC Group, became the major shareholder.

“We initially did not have the plan to unload shares in Big C Thailand but after winning the bidding for Big C in Vietnam we realised we should have enough cash to support the business expansion here,” he explained.

Central realised Bt50 billion from the sale of its shares in Big C Thailand, however, it did not use the funds for the Big C deal in Vietnam because the group had already signed the bridging loan for more than Bt10 billion with a Thai bank, he said.

Prin said that while Central may slow down buying up businesses in Vietnam, it had not closed the window on inorganic growth because the latter offers a quicker pace of growth than the organic way. Starting from zero, the group has spent much more time dealing with many parties including construction developers and suppliers.

Central has only one department store in Jakarta, since 2014, but under the group’s plan, it would like to have five more stores in Jakarta and Surabaya by 2017.

The group plans to add a second Central Department Store in Jakarta in the third quarter of this year.