Emily Halgrimson, Today’s Machining World’s Managing Editor, is currently on a press tour of Thailand’s manufacturing industry. The following are her first impressions.
Monday: The tour has been awesome so far!! Food is incredible and others in group are great. We are in 5 star hotels and being treated like royalty. Toured Western Digital yesterday and an investment fair. Today off to Pattaya to a spa hotel and day of tours and meetings. Haven’t spotted any screw machines so far but will keep looking.
Tuesday: Thailand Board of Investment CEO Forum today. Guest speaker: Tony Blair. Thailand is putting on a huge push for foreign investment, including an eight year tax holiday, free leases on land for a time, no taxes on imports of equipment, and free work visas for foreign tech workers and business leaders.
4 Comments
Is there much damage visible from the recent flooding? Are thy talking about the floods?
I thought you were going to rough it.
Evidence of the flood isn’t visible on the street, except for the occasional water line on a wall way above my head. Western Digital had 1.9 meters of water in its huge plant. Workers lived there for a month pumping water out and Navy divers went in in the dark to fetch expensive equipment. Western Digital used a warehouse of a distributor 45 km away to store and begin restoring equipment while the flood waters resides in their Bangkok plant. So they were able to get back to work a week after the flood waters disappeared. Touring the plant just a month after the flood it was hard to imagine any disaster at all. It’s one of the cleanest facilities I’ve ever toured. More to come. Tomorrow will tour Dow Chemical, Ford and Chevy!
“Thailand Board of Investment CEO Forum today. Guest speaker: Tony Blair. Thailand is putting on a huge push for foreign investment, including an eight year tax holiday, free land, no taxes on imports of equipment and free work visas for foreign tech workers and business leaders.”
Any word on expected/projected outcome of American’s moving over for this? I’m interested to learn more….
Derek – From what I saw and heard while in Thailand, most of the American companies currently based there make parts mostly for their East Asia operations. For example, the GM plant on the south eastern seaboard produces the Ford Fiesta and light-weight trucks, but none that I know of are shipped to North America. Thailand seems to be Japan’s well-kept secret. They’ve been investing there for 20-30 years (Toyota is huge there) and continue to do so. One notable exception is Asian Precision, a precision machining company I’ll go into more detail about later, which has become a key supplier for Emerson in North America. So key that Emerson is asking them to open a facility in Mexico so they can expand their business with them. They are currently investigating whether it makes sense to do so. They aren’t calling Thailand the “Detroit of the East” for nothing.