BEM managing director Sombat Kijjaluck said that the first project would be the MRT Orange Line (western part) that runs from Thailand Cultural Center to Bang Khun Non. “This project has an estimated value of Bt120 billion and will include the construction and administration of the train system under a 30-year concession contract.”

The second project that the BEM is eyeing is the MRT Purple Line (southern part) on the Taopoon-Ratburana route, a distance of 23.6 kilometres. “This project is worth around Bt100 billion and is the extension of the MRT Bangsue-Bangyai section that the company is currently operating,” added Sombat.

“BEM is confident that we will win the bids for both projects because of our expertise in tunnel boring and the fact that our operational cost will be lower than that of our competitors, as we can use the existing maintenance facilities of the MRT Blue Line,” he added. “We estimate that the two projects will help increase MRT users by 10-20 per cent in the next 5-10 years.”

Sombat added that BEM is strictly employing social distancing measures after the government eased lockdown measures and more commuters started using MRT services since earlier this month. “We have added 49 trains during rush hours in the morning and evening to reduce the crowd; we are alao disinfecting touching surfaces every two hours to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and other germs,” he said.

“The company’s profit from MRT and expressways in the first quarter of 2020 has slightly decreased due to the outbreak, but we estimate that things would improve in the next one or two months,” added Sombat. “Currently around 80-85 per cent of expressway users have returned as people travel more after the lockdown was lifted in several areas.”

This is the fifth licence for the shipping of LNG to be granted. The other four licences are held by PTT Plc, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, Gulf Energy Development Plc and Hin Kong Power Holding Co Ltd (HKH), in which Gulf Energy Development holds a 49-per-cent stake.

The revenue for last year was more than double the company’s tally of about $7.4 billion in 2018, propelled by phenomenal growth in user traffic that’s drawn advertisers away from Tencent Holdings and Baidu. The people asked not to be identified because the financial details are private.

ByteDance has emerged as one of the tech industry’s most surprising success stories, an innovative Chinese company that is challenging the global dominance of U.S. internet giants. It draws some 1.5 billion monthly active users to a family of apps that includes the TikTok short-video platform, its Chinese twin Douyin and the news service Toutiao. This month, the company poached Walt Disney Co. streaming czar Kevin Mayer to become chief executive officer of TikTok.

The company owes much of its success to TikTok, now the online repository of choice for lip-synching and dance videos by American teens. The ambitious company is also pushing aggressively into a plethora of new arenas from gaming and search to music. ByteDance could fetch a valuation of between $150 billion and $180 billion in an initial public offering, a premium relative to sales of as much as 20% to social media giant Tencent thanks to a larger global footprint and burgeoning games business, estimated Ke Yan, Singapore-based analyst with DZT Research.

“None of the Chinese tech companies has achieved this level of success in the global market before ByteDance,” he said, adding neither social media company harbors much debt. “The fact that ByteDance is making profit, if true, and sitting on a $6 billion cash pile means that it is not in a rush at all to come to market to raise capital, and therefore less likely to offer the shares at a more reasonable price for IPO investors.”

ByteDance, led by Zhang Yiming, is becoming a viable rival to the dominant American online behemoths, Facebook and Alphabet Inc. Facebook unit Instagram brought in about $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019, Bloomberg previously reported. Google said its video unit YouTube recorded $15.1 billion in ad sales last year.

ByteDance representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

That success has come despite American lawmakers raising concerns about privacy and censorship. In a rare bipartisan effort in Washington, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., last year urged an investigation into TikTok, labeling it a national security threat.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to regulate or shut down social media companies, tweeting that the platforms attempt to silence conservative voices. Twitter Inc. on Tuesday added a fact-checking link to two of Trump’s tweets to his 80 million followers.

ByteDance is strengthening its operations in newer arenas such as e-commerce and gaming. This year, it kicked off a wave of hiring and envisions hitting 40,000 new jobs in 2020, hoping to match headcount of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. at a time technology corporations across the globe are furloughing or reducing staff.

The company had very preliminary discussions about an initial public offering last year, but is in no rush to go public given its financial performance, people have said. It now has more than $6 billion of cash on hand, the people said.

ByteDance, which is backed by SoftBank Group Corp., General Atlantic and Sequoia, is already the world’s most valuable startup, according to researcher CB Insights. Some private trades recently valued the Chinese company between $105 billion and $110 billion on the secondary markets, Bloomberg News previously reported. It has also traded as high as $140 billion, one person said, making it one of the most highly valued private companies of all time.