* BlackBerry’s days in Thailand are numbered
If you believe the most optimistic estimates floating around, there are 1.5 million smartphones being used in Thailand and 500,000 of them are BlackBerrys.
Software developers and telecom staff doubt there are quite that many smartphones or BlackBerrys. Perhaps there are only 1 million smartphone users. But they all agree on one point: BlackBerrys are by far the most popular smartphone in Thailand. (RIM’s office in Singapore declined to estimate and doesn’t yet have an office in Thailand).
Interest in developing apps for the BlackBerry is nonetheless slender.
If a company is committed to creating an application for all operating systems, it will get to BlackBerry eventually, but that isn’t the first or even second system in the queue. The skepticism about BlackBerry’s future stems stems partly from the kludginess of the operating system, which developers and analysts worldwide think will soon be outpaced by the superior iPhone, Android and Windows 7.
Then there are the reasons BlackBerry has done so well in Thailand—and Indonesia. Prices for a handset are below THB 10,000 on the grey market, which is at least half the price of an iPhone and about the same as local smartphone brand Spriing and Taiwan’s HTC. The clincher for Thai and Indonesian consumers has been the reasonable prepaid monthly packages that include unlimited text messages. In Thailand a package costs less than THB 600 per month. Unlike SMS messages, these are conveyed via the internet but otherwise BlackBerry users tend not to browse the Web or use the other internet-enabled features that telecom operators would so dearly love to charge for.
Users of other smartphone brands and operating systems in Thailand probably don’t use many of their internet options either.
Many of BlackBerry’s most visible users, like students and female office workers, are a fickle lot. “Some say that Thais change their mobile phone every eight months,” said Freewill FX’s Nuttapon Boonpinon. Moreover, loyalty to the BlackBerry phone hasn’t transferred to MORE
This was a sidebar accompanying a story I wrote on Thai smartphone app developers. It appeared in the June 2011 issue of Business Report Thailand.
* Coupon clash
By Susan Cunningham
Southeast Asia Globe
As discount deal websites explode in the region, a Thai company shows how it’s done.
Deep-discount deal sites have been surging throughout the United States and Europe for almost three years, but they were late off the starting blocks in Southeast Asia – arriving only in mid 2010. Since then, they have moved and morphed, bought and sold themselves.
In June 2010, when Tom Srivorakul and his two younger brothers launched Ensogo, the first deal website in Thailand, they employed five people and had a single offer: a 60% discount at ice cream chain iBerry.
A year later, when Ensogo was bought for an undisclosed sum by LivingSocial, the second-largest US deal company with a monthly revenue of $50m as of the start of this year, the start-up had 430 employees, 17 city sites in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia and more than two million subscribers to its daily discount deal e-letter … MORE
* Thai Union Frozen is the Big Kahuna of Tuna
By Susan J. Cunningham
Forbes Asia Magazine dated November 07, 2011
Thailand has long boasted a seafood superpower. Now second-generation leader Thiraphong Chansiri has made Thai Union Frozen truly global.
Last year, when the world’s largest tuna exporter announced it was buying 143-year-old John West and three other venerable European seafood brands in an $883 million deal, few Europeans had heard of Thai Union Frozen. “In fact, very few Thai people would know our company,” says Thai Union President Thiraphong Chansiri. “It’s our culture, our personality. We never paid much attention to the press.” For years it was primarily a contract producer for international brands, and it still draws more than 90% of its revenue from overseas, so it was enough to be respected by investors, analysts and heavyweight customers in the U.S. and Japan, he says.
That’s changed under the 46-year-old Thiraphong, the eldest son of a cofounder and the face of a company that never needed a face before. Thai Union has wholly owned the third most popular US tuna brand, Chicken of the Sea, since 2000. Now, with the purchase of John West, France’s Hyacinthe Parmentier and … MORE
For those that persist to the end, I’m not responsible for the many Thai companies that “floundered” in 1997; they foundered, of course.
* Motoring with Mohammed: Living La Vida Yemeni
Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea
by Eric Hansen (Vantage)
Reviewed by Susan Cunningham.
Eric Hansen, the intrepid, foolhardy author of Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo, is back with adventures from a beguiling corner of the Middle East. Back in 1978, after a yacht-wreck in the Red Sea, he was stranded for two weeks on an uninhabited island off the coast of North Yemen. Rescued after two weeks by a boatload of amiable Eritrean arms smugglers, he left buried on the island a pile of notebooks that he had compiled during seven years of bumming around Greater Asia.
Most of Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea takes place a decade later when Hansen returns with the hope of recovering his notebooks. His plans to revisit the island are stymied by bureaucracy, military security zones, and rumors of the presence of Yasser Arafat. Fortunately, Hansen rapidly loses his sense of mission as he falls into the rhythms of the Yemeni male lifestyle. This demands spending a large part of each day chewing a hallucinogenic leaf called qat.
Read more »
