Customs Thai SME’s must improve in advance of AEC, Abhisit says, Bangkok Post, Jan 28 Thai small businesses must continue to improve in order to better cope with growing competition in the domestic and international markets, says Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Mr Abhisit inspects a display of fabric yesterday at the ThailandSMEExpo 2010 exhibition, where he said that Thai small and medium-sized businesses should no longer expect to rely on low labour costs to compete in international markets. SOMCHAI POOMLARD Competition will only increase as the region continues to liberalise trade and investment barriers and moves to forge closer co-operative ties. Mr Abhisit, speaking at the opening of the Thailand SME Expo 2010 exhibition, said within five years Asean's 10 member-states will join together to create a massive, integrated market under the Asean Economic Community initiative. The AEC will offer massive growth opportunities for local companies, but only if they have the experience, networks and flexibility to expand abroad. Mr Abhisit said the government is looking closely at how small businesses can take advantage of market liberalisation, whether under Asean or the larger Apec grouping. Many small Thai firms currently serve as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), leveraging low labour costs as their primary competitive advantage. Finance Thailand targets THB 500 Billion New Investment Requests This Year, Dow Jones, Jan 27 Thailand expects to receive new investment requests from companies worth THB500 billion ($15.1 billion) this year, nearly 31% less than the amount it received last year, due to the absence of special tax incentives, the Board of Investment said Tuesday. Thailand plans deficit budget for 2010/2011, Reuters, Jan 26 Thailand's government plans to propose a 2.07 trillion baht ($62.7 billion) fiscal budget for the year to September 2011, up from 1.70 trillion a year earlier, Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij said on Tuesday. Food & Agriculture Tariff on Thai shrimp likely to remain, Daily Comet, Jan 28 Federal officials said the Southern Shrimp Alliance has not proven it represents enough of the domestic shrimp industry. The group, which represents fishermen and processors in eight shrimp-producing states, had sought to eliminate a tariff on Thai shrimp in exchange for a settlement payment from the country. Another group, the American Shrimp Processors Association, which represents packers and peelers in Louisiana and elsewhere, strongly opposed eliminating the tariff. The issue is important to local shrimpers, who have complained for years that a flood of cheap imports is putting them out of business. Thailand cancels sale of 375,000 tons of rice from stockpiles, Bloomberg, Jan 26 Thailand, the biggest rice exporter, canceled a plan to sell 375,000 metric tons from state reserves because of low offer prices, Commerce Minister Porntiva Nakasai said today in Bangkok. The ministry received bids from 22 companies to buy 1.02 million tons, the Department of Foreign Trade said last week. Health & Life Sciences Healthcare plans will be hard to unite, Bangkok Post, Jan 27 "The Thai experience of introducing the universal healthcare coverage is an example for the rest of the world in how it's possible to finance and organise health care for everyone in the country," Ms Mills said. "In the future it will be important to try to bring those schemes more closely together to address some of inequalities in the level of resources available for those different population groups." Up to 5 million civil servants and their families are entitled to free medical care provided by the government. Their medical expenses are reimbursed by the Comptroller-General's Department under the Finance Ministry. The medical welfare budget for civil servants has skyrocketed from 30 billion baht to 80 billion a year over the past four years, compared to an estimated 115 billion baht for 48 million people listed under the universal healthcare coverage. The Social Security Office handles a fund which is worth more than 400 billion baht. It makes a profit of about 20 billion baht a year in interest from the legal requirement for about 9 million employers and employees of private companies to contribute 1.5% of their income to the fund. Information & Communications Technology IBM backs “Creative Thailand” Initiative, Bangkok Post, Jan 27 The company has a software and global skill share resource team to offer a new variety of services such as Business Analytics and Optimization (BAO) and Managed Business Process Services (MBPS) to make smarter business decisions by improving and accelerating their business decision-making process. "In today's environment, data doubles every 11 hours while executives spend 14-15 hours to reply to email and 9.6 hours to analyse data. This shows that information is overwhelming businesses and that does not include social networking data," Thawa noted. Meredith Angwin, Country Manager, Global Business Services at IBM, added that BAO is beyond business intelligence that focusses on reports, combining advanced analytic capability tools and software to minimise the data gap that helps to predict and push business forward. BAO will address critical client needs through in key areas such as advanced customer insight that brings intelligent profitable growth, analytic data optimisation to help cost take-out and efficiency, risk and fraud analysis enabling proactive risk management. The shift towards optimisation creates an opportunity to become a more intelligent enterprises. For example, telecom and finance businesses can focus more on their customer insights to find the right and high value customers. Apichart Asavatevavith, IBM Thailand's Country Manager, Managed Business Process Services, said in today's business even in backend support systems such as procurement and finance, if a business can find the room to improve, it will help to save costs and increase efficiency including create differentiating from competitors. Infrastructure GM to spend $455 million on Thai Expansion, Reuters, Jan 29 General Motors Corp announced plans on Friday to spend 15 billion baht ($455 million) in Thailand over the next two years, reviving plans for a new diesel-engine plant and retooling existing production lines. The expansion at its existing plant in Thailand's Rayong Province, a region dubbed "the Detroit of Asia" for its large concentration of global carmakers, will be financed by 13.5 billion baht local syndicated loan, GM executives said. The rest will be provided through injection of equity by the Detroit automaker to its wholly owned Thai unit, Bangkok Bank, Siam Commercial Bank and Tisco Bank signed contracts pledging to provide GM (Thailand) Ltd the credit line. GM executives said the company would spend $150 million building a diesel-engine plant with a 106,000-unit annual capacity and another $330 million retooling the plant's machinery. "After the retooling process needed for our next generation pick-up trucks and special utility vehicles, our annual capacity would be around 120,000 units," Steve Carlisle, GM chief executive for South East Asia, said.
Businesses fear impact of Map ta Phut setback, Bangkok Post, Jan 27 Business leaders yesterday repeated their pleas for the government to speed up the resolution of the Map Ta Phut case, saying the latest court verdict to reject requests to restart 30 projects had severely depressed the investment climate. Further prolonging the uncertainty over the giant industrial estate would make the outlook for industry development even worse, said Payungsak Chartsutthipol, vice-chairman of the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI). The FTI today plans to make new proposals to resolve the impasse to the Joint Standing Committee on Commerce, Industry and Banking before submitting them to Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Mr Payungsak said the FTI would ask the premier to work with the private sector on a solution within 15 days. The FTI will also ask the Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning to speed up its decision on which projects do not need to conduct environmental impact assessments (EIAs). "If the projects conformed with Section 67 of the 2007 Constitution, then they can go ahead, but for projects that need to submit petitions [to continue], these will have to be submitted by the government," he said. It also calls for processes under Section 67 to be finished within five months and to shorten the process of conducting EIAs and health impact assessments. GE Plans longterm in Thailand, Forbes, Jan 26 General Electric Co. , the world’s biggest maker of power-generation and medical-imaging equipment, jet engines and locomotives, on Tuesday signed a 13-year deal to maintain gas turbines for Thailand’s largest chemical producer. GE has supplied more than 20 gas turbines to the petrochemical business of PTT Chemical Public Co. Ltd, but the new contractual service agreement signals a longer-term interest to build business in the emerging economy. The deal covers three GE Frame 5 gas turbines and six Frame 6 gas turbines at PTT Chemical’s site in Map Ta Phut Industrial Estate, Rayong Province.
Politics Other
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