BANGKOK, Thailand – Despite the devastating floods that hit Thailand in 2011, forcing a freeze in automotive and computer chip manufacturing critical to the global supply chain, the country’s GDP is expected to reach six percent this year according to the Bank of Thailand.

In fact, the latest Bloomberg Emerging Markets (www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-22/thailand-proving-best-after-china-among-global-emerging-markets.html) report ranked Thailand second only to China as one of the most-promising emerging and frontier markets for investors. Thailand was also ranked as the easiest place to do business of all top 15 emerging markets in the study.

Thailand’s government has invested over $11 billion in future flood defenses to protect the country’s infrastructure which plays a significant role in attracting major investments from the world’s most innovative companies, including GE, Ford, Kraft and Pfizer. The Thailand Board of Investment, the government’s investment promotion agency, recently reported that despite flooding, foreign investment applications for Thailand increased by 92 percent year-over-year in the first two months of 2012, to over $5 billion.

“Thailand’s strategic location at the center of Asia is an asset that will only increase as the new industrial economies and their populations’ GDP and purchasing power rise,” said Atchaka Sibunruang, Secretary-General of the Thailand Board of Investment.

“Our country’s world-class infrastructure is comprised of well-developed supply chains for automotive and technology manufacturing and our workforce has a knowledge base in those industries that has advanced for decades. These strong economic fundamentals will continue to solidify Thailand as a leading economic power in the future.”

Thailand’s strengths lie in its position as the largest car manufacturer in Southeast Asia and the producer of around 40 percent of the world’s computer hard disk drives. The country’s vast natural resources have also made it the world’s top producer of rubber, the second largest exporter of sugar and the top rice exporter. These assets, along with quick access to 575 million of Southeast Asia’s consumers, make the country a prime investment location for multinationals in the decades ahead.

With manufacturing expected to fully recover to pre-flood levels by the end of the second quarter, and domestic and export markets on the rebound from the global financial crisis, Thailand’s location at the center of Asia’s rapidly expanding consumer market looks ever more attractive to future investors.

For more information about the Thailand Board of Investment, visit www.thinkasiainvestthailand.com.

Image Courtesy of  Wutthichai / Shutterstock.com

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Glocation and Greentailing – these two terms are not directly related to each other but both are popular trends in retail that refer to understanding and satisfying society and customers’ needs. Glocation and Greentailing appear in business as answers to preserve local identity and customs and to promote an eco-life style.

Over the past quarter century, the notion of glocalism has had various connotations. In the 1980s, President Akio Morita of Sony, one of the world’s most successful multinational companies, used this term to de­scribe a corporate strategy and enclosed it in one phrase, “think global, act local.”

According to the Uri Savir and Walter Veltroni organizators of First Glocal Forum in Rome in May 2002, glocalism is said to be a solution for those seeking a balance between global forces and local needs, interests and identities.  

Representatives of CERFE, an Italian economic and social science research organization, where Savir and Veltroni provide as advisors, describe glocalism as: “a social process that is especially evident in cities where it consists of the concurrent drives toward globalization and localization.”

Glocalism is also seen as “diffused social action…that can be interpreted as a kind of ideal and cultural movement oriented towards linking the benefits of globalization to local situations, and toward governing globalization also through local situations.”

Next to glocalism, the “mega-city” syndrome is defined. According to Thomas Hoog, vice chair of Hill&Knowlton (international communications consultancy company), “by the year 2015 there will be twenty-five mega-cities, nineteen of them in developing countries, and fifteen of them in Asia.

In addition to these mega-cities, there will be fifty-nine cities with populations greater than five million. Those crowded, polluted, urban centers will by and large not have the well-developed infrastructures that have sustained today’s major cities.” Big cities are like magnets with high paying jobs and self-development opportunities.

But on the other hand, cities are subject to growing disproportionate income and harshly strained infrastructures. There is need for institutional change and social adaptation to preserve local identity and customs. Providing the opportunities to act locally around the world is a way to achieve greater efficiencies, to optimize supply chains and to tailor products to local needs.

Similar to glocalism, green retailing is also progressively more popular term. It is an answer for increasing societal awareness to environmental problems such as pollution.  In practice, it means that retailers sell eco-products and adopt a number of environmentally friendly actions to preserve resources and eliminate waste in order to protect the environment.

What is going follow that customer’s consciousness about eco-friendly shopping and green lifestyle increase as an answer for new trend. Greentailing philosophy has got great influence for consumer decision making who became an essential part of the threat of global warming and increasing concern about impact that business have on the environment.

From the moment of identifying customer own needs to the moment of making purchasing decision, customer is affected by green retailing in many ways starting from eco- friendly packaging, paper bags, catchwords and ending on the totally new approach to doing business where the products and entire supplier chain are adopted to eco-rules.

Big corporations like Wal-Mart, Tesco and eBay have adopted the greentailing strategy in order to develop their business practices. In April 2010, eBay ran a campaign encouraging customers to buy products made from eco-friendly materials, or products that require less energy. During the campaign they collaborated with Team Earth and Cooler Inc. to reduce their carbon footprint.

The profits generated from the campaign were given to environmental and nonprofit organizations such as the Make it Right Foundation. Authors Neil Z. Stern and Willard N. Ander in their book Winning at Retail: Developing a Sustained Model for Retail Success, Greentailing and Other Revolutions in Retail suggest that the increasing popularity of green retailing is just an answer for customer’s needs and their tastes change.

The same authors explain that retail is nothing more than seeking what consumers want and satisfying their needs in order to stay innovative and competitive on local and world markets. Glocalism and Greentailing are answers for these needs.

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