The move is seen as a key step in facilitating e-commerce and e-transaction activities in Thailand.

ETDA predicts that the total e-commerce market in Thailand will increase significantly by about 14 per cent this year to Bt3.3 trillion, up from Bt3.1 trillion in 2018, according to Surangkana Wayuparb, president and CEO.

“The growth of e-commerce and e-transaction activities in Thailand has been driven by changing lifestyles of the Thai consumers,” she said, adding that the move has pushed Thailand to the highest growth in customer to customer online sales and activities in Asean. Meanwhile, in business to business, the country is lagging behind its neighbours including Singapore.

Surangkana said Thailand should have “local digital platforms” with a distinct Thai feel and signature to promote e-commerce activities in the country, and the development of data will be a significant element.

Working with NIA and ETDA will put a priority on raising funds and feeding them into the development of local platforms, she said. About Bt1 billion of the funding budget will be raised this year, especially from capital funds, private companies and other financial instruments, such as crowd funding.

“Under this collaboration, we will integrate knowledge, technology and innovation to promote the platform and ecosystem in electronic transactions.”

ETDA has a goal to push the emergence of an e-Commerce Park, which will play a similar role in Thailand’s e-commerce as Silicon Valley to the US computer industry. The park would incubate startups and SMEs and help build a labour force to feed the Thai e-commerce future market through a Young Talent Platform.

Ultimately, a workforce of 1 million could be involved in the sector, and 200,000 SMEs, said Surangkana.

The collaboration with NIA will bring closer the dream of a vigorous Thai e-commerce sector, she predicted, as people could see progress on building an e-commerce ecosystem, and connections between entrepreneurs and funding sources.

Pun-arj Chairatana, NIA director, noted that e-transactions now account for about 10 per cent of Thailand’s GDP, and will increase to between 30 per cent and 40 per cent within the next five years.

“Through the cooperation with ETDA, we [NIA] will provide funding and electronic transaction support to local startups and SMEs, focusing on three different groups – students incubating new startups, local startups, and professionals and corporates,” said Pun-arj.

Pun-arj said that for this collaboration, the focus will be on collaborative activities to promote and support education, research, technology development, and innovations in electronic transactions and e-commerce of small to medium sized enterprises and start-ups, in order to build business platforms and electronic transaction ecosystems.

In addition, they will jointly develop courses in electronic transactions, training and academic meetings, as well as knowledge exchange discussions that include recruiting sources of funds for entrepreneurs, experts or people who are interested in expanding electronic transactions.

Amazon is not setting up a company, but creating a dedicated team in Thailand aimed at helping Thai sellers, brand owners and manufacturers to explore online export opportunities and to expand their international business by reaching more than 300 million Amazon global customers.

Bernard Tay, director of Amazon Global Selling Southeast Asia, said that Thailand is the second office in Asean after Singapore that will focus on helping Thai businesses benefit from cross-border commerce via Amazon e-marketplace platforms, with 18 websites, but starting with amazon.com.

“Amazon Global Selling has a regional office in Singapore. Thailand is the first office in Southeast Asia outside Singapore. This shows how much importance we attach to the Thai market,” said Tay.

He said the setting up of a dedicated team in Thailand was because of the Kingdom’s emerging manufacturing base, constant export growth of 7 per cent and the government’s digital transformation policy.

“We have just started a dedicated team. We hope to build more confidence and educate sellers in the beginning,” said Tay.

The team will provide educational support to potential Thai sellers with respect to selling on Amazon on-boarding process including account registration, listing creation, account operation, and Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA). Sellers will benefit from FBA’s bulk shipment, meaning more economies of scale and warehousing, especially for quick shipment. It has partnered with many logistics and transport companies

Revenue models are service fee (monthly fee), commission and FBA service charge.

The company will focus on the first five priority product categories which are high-potential Thai products like toys, apparel, home products, sport and pet products. These five product categories are in high demand from customers in the US while Thailand is strong in these products.

“We are cooperating with some government organisations and other partners to educate Thai sellers. However, there is no policy level cooperation with the government like what Alibaba did with the Thai government,” said Tay.

The global e-commerce trend shows that e-commerce grew 4 times faster than the retail market. In 2018, the e-commerce market grew by 23 per cent while retail market growth was 6 per cent. The cross-border B2C e-commerce market is growing rapidly and is expected to reach 27 and 29 per cent of total global B2C e-commerce in 2019 and 2020 respectively. It increased from 20 per cent in 2018.

On the Amazon platform, sales by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) were only 3 per cent in 1999 but jumped to 58 per cent in 2018. Amazon said it has helped SMEs worldwide do business and around 200,000 SMEs generate more than US$100,000 in sales on Amazon. Over 50 per cent of products available on Amazon are contributed by SMEs.

Amazon Global Selling has 18 websites with businesses from 130 countries selling on AGS. It also has 175 fulfilment centres that can deliver products to customers in 185 countries and regions. Customers now have more choices, with easier access to products from other markets.

REDUCING inequality, creating opportunities for people in rural areas and building the competitiveness of the country.   These are the cited reasons behind the government’s programme to bring digital infrastructure to all people throughout the country and to increase their knowledge and access to services as they use the Net Pracharat network.

Ajarin Pattanapanchai, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, said they have educated people throughout the country on how to utilise the infrastructure network of Net Pracharat.

This is being done because the programme will have long-term benefits that include both economic and social impacts for the country.

With Net Pracharat, all Thais will have equitable and affordable access to several sources of information and services, including for education, healthcare, e-commerce and government services, said Ajarin.

This would lead the country toward the path of long-term stability, prosperity and sustainability, Ajarin said.

Hard infrastructure

The Village Broadband Internet (Net Pracharat) project’s infrastructure was completed in December 2017, when MDES and Telephone of Thailand Public Company Limited (TOT) laid down the last of a fibre cable network targeting 24,700 rural villages throughout the Kingdom.

One of Thailand’s national flagship projects, Net Pracharat aims to ensure reliable digital infrastructure and equitable access to information and communication technology throughout the country.

Meanwhile, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) is responsible for 3,920 villages in border areas, and the remaining 15,732 target villages in rural areas.

In 2019, the ministry continues to emphasise the use of Net Pracharat, with volunteers in 24,700 villages, as the young generation and community leaders work to coordinate the project. They report to the ministry about the daily functioning of the high-speed internet Net Pracharat network, other infrastructure-related suggestions, as well as the other needs of local people.

In collaboration with the Ministry of Interior (MOI), training sessions have already reached one million local people.

The ministry has also focused on the community digital centres in each village, transforming each locale into a learning centre for the Net Pracharat project and allowing further development of the network to advance local community economic benefit.

The ministry this year will emphasise creating applications and other uses on top of the Net Pracharat infrastructure including e-commerce, telemedicine and education.

The additional activities will include Thailand Post’s Point of Sale (POS) initiative to create a logistics platform for delivering products for the villages in support of local e-commerce through OTOP and community enterprises.  It aims to expand the POS infrastructure, offering e-marketplace, e-payment, and e-logistic services for the local digital communities, from 200 units to 5,000 units.

About 900 people have already brought some 1,700 product items onto the platform and created revenues of Bt20 million for community enterprises.

This year, the ministry will also focus on finding ways to leverage the Net Pracharat infrastructure for public health benefits. The 30/10 megabits per second (Mbps) network speed as is not enough for establishing telemedicine, so the ministry, working with the Ministry of Public Health, will next upgrade the network speed to 100 Mbps to enable it in 10 locations.

Fibre optics for schools

Fibre optics will also be deployed this year by the ministry to support school initiatives, bringing high-speed internet to 2,000 to 3,000 schools throughout the country, including the Border Patrol Police School. The Ministry of Education will also be involved.

The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society will also build the fibre optics network to reach over 800 Tambon Health Promoting Hospitals, the first level of the public health service system in  communities.  “The initiative delivering fibre optics to hospitals is to encourage telemedicine to become a reality throughout the country,” said Ajarin.

The ministry is also working to prepare for the 5G era, as it establishes a 5G test bed and conducts 5G field trials at a digital park in the Eastern Economic Corridor.

Daisy will disassemble and recycle select used iPhones returned to Best Buy stores throughout the US and KPN retailers in the Netherlands. Customers can also turn in their eligible devices to be recycled at any Apple Store or through Apple.com/th as part of the Apple Trade In programme.

Apple has received nearly 1 million devices through Apple programmes and each Daisy can disassemble 1.2 million devices per year. In 2018, the company refurbished more than 7.8 million Apple devices and helped divert more than 48,000 metric tons of electronic waste from landfills.

Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, said that advanced recycling must become an integral part of the electronics supply chain.

“Apple is pioneering a new path to help push our industry forward. We work hard to design products that our customers can rely on for a long time. When the time comes to recycle them, we hope that the convenience of our programmes will encourage everyone to bring in their old devices,” she explained.

Daisy is now able to disassemble 15 different iPhone models at the rate of 200 per hour, recovering ever-more important materials for re-use. Once materials have been recovered from Daisy, they are recycled back into the manufacturing process. For cobalt, a key battery material, Apple sends iPhone batteries recovered by Daisy upstream in its supply chain. They are then combined with scrap from selected manufacturing sites and, for the first time, cobalt recovered through this process is now being used to make brand-new Apple batteries — a closed loop for this precious material.

Apple also uses 100-per-cent recycled tin in a key component of the main logic boards of 11 different products. The company’s engineering of an aluminium alloy made from 100-per-cent recycled aluminium allows the new MacBook Air and Mac mini to have nearly half the carbon footprint of earlier models. Starting this year, aluminium recovered through the Apple Trade In programme is being remelted into the enclosures for the MacBook Air.

To further its research into recycling, Apple has also announced the opening of its Material Recovery Lab dedicated to discovering future recycling processes. The new 836-square-metre facility in Austin, Texas, will look for innovative solutions involving robotics and machine learning to improve on traditional methods like targeted disassembly, sorting and shredding. The Lab will work with Apple engineering teams as well as academia to address and propose solutions to today’s industry recycling challenges.

Apple continues to expand its programmes to ensure devices are used for as long as possible. The number of Apple Stores and network of authorised service providers has grown to more than 5,000 worldwide. Last autumn, Apple rolled out a new method for optimising iPhone screen repairs that allows thousands more independent shops to offer the service. Apple has also launched a battery replacement and recycling programme for all of its products.

Now Apple has released its 2019 Environment report, which contains additional information on the company’s climate change solutions, including its recent announcement that 44 of its suppliers have committed to 100-per-cent renewable energy for their Apple production.

It is projected that in 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. PET is one of the most common manufactured plastic polymers (approximately 10-per-cent of total plastics produced per year), is a key ingredient in food and beverage packages and in the fibres of cloth. Historically, most of this material has not been recycled, the primary reason why 8 million metric tons of PET plastics are estimated to go into the ocean each year.

Plastic recycling is collapsing in many parts of the US. Demand for recycled materials has declined because there is too much trash in the sorting mix. As a result, many recycling companies are trying to claw back their profits by raising the cost of their services. In turn, cities like Philadelphia are resorting to incinerating their recyclables for energy, even forcing Memphis International Airport to send its bins straight to landfills. According to the California treasurer, Fiona Ma, “it’s a crisis in the recycling movement right now”.

To help address this problem, IBM recently announced a novel “selective digestion” recycling technique that can significantly streamline the sorting process and turn the PET commonly found in food and beverage packaging into a renewable resource, rather than trash destined for our landfills and waterways.

In the coming years, advancements like VolCat will make plastics recycling more efficient and more versatile in treating a wider range of material types than its predecessors.

Unlike traditional mechanical recycling, future plastics recycling will break down both coloured and clear plastics, as well as dirty and clean containers, producing a high-quality final product that is 100-per-cent recyclable. It should be noted that mechanical recycling can only be used on clear, pre-cleaned containers and results in a material that’s only reusable when combined with new PET.

Plastic bottles, containers, and PET-based fabrics will be collected, ground up and combined with a chemical catalyst in a pressure cooker set to above 200 degrees Celsius.

With heat and a small amount of pressure, the catalyst is able to digest and clean the ground-up plastic, with the process separating contaminants (eg, food residue, glue, dirt, dyes and pigments) from material that is useable for new PET. The useable matter, called a monomer, takes the form of a white powder, which can be fed directly into a polyester reactor to make brand-new plastics.

For people at home, future recycling advancements will mean no more sorting, rinsing and separating used containers, wrappers and plastics. All polyester waste can go directly into the dustbin and out to the curb for collection and from there to a recycling facility, to be digested and transformed into new and renewable material.

If this new research breakthrough is adopted by the plastics and recycling industries, people at the grocery store buying a bottle of soda or punnet of strawberries will know that the plastic they purchased won’t end up in the ocean and in just over 30 years, outweigh the fish.

Patama Chantaruck is vice-president of Indochina Expansion and managing director of IBM Thailand.