Transcript: Thailand insights and opportunities
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Greg Wallis ‒ Senior Trade Commissioner Thailand
Greg manages a team of 19 staff in Bangkok, including 12 business development managers, focused on developing the important and dynamic commercial relationship between Thailand and Australia. His team helps Australian companies develop trade with Thailand, particularly in the energy, infrastructure, automotive, food and beverage, skills development and aged-care sectors, as well as promoting Australian education to Thai students and investment opportunities to Thai corporations. Greg is fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese.
He joined the Australian Trade Commission in 2008. He was appointed the Consul-General and Trade Commissioner in São Paulo, Brazil. Prior to joining Austrade, he worked with diverse private-sector companies in global business management.
Transcript
>>Greg Wallis: So in Thailand I think that there’s several major sectors that Australian companies should and can be focusing on. One of the most important is to recognise that Thailand is a very big manufacturing power. Thailand is a global power when it comes to electronics manufacturing, food and pro... food processing manufacturing, and the automotive sector.
The one that’s been most important to Australia to date has been automotive. There are about 20 Australian companies who are active in the sector in Thailand and they’ve become part of regional and global supply chains to provide products, components, to the automotive assembly industry in Thailand, which is about 11 times the size of the industry in Australia. So when you think about the development of an opportunity which is much greater in this part of the world, in the ASEAN region, based in Thailand than what it is in Australia then it makes sense for those companies to consider coming to Thailand because they have access to a much greater market. It’s not been about closing facilities in Australia and off-shoring those jobs, it’s been about accessing a bigger market through these regional and global supply chains.
The Thailand-Australia Free Trade Agreement, or TAFTA as it’s called, has been in place since 2005 and since that time we’ve seen almost a doubling of bilateral trade between Thailand and Australia, not all due to TAFTA but certainly it’s had a very significant effect and we’ve seen --- when you go to a supermarket in Thailand you’ll see Australian produce on the shelves, you see Australian beef and lamb, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, a lot of dairy products. That trade has been greatly facilitated by TAFTA because it means we have preferential rates compared to most of our competitors from the US and Europe. So that’s been a great facilitator and continues to be a great facilitator of increasing trade opportunities for Australia companies in those sectors.
Two things that the Australian government can help with in Thailand for Australian businesses. The first one is what we call our badge of government; the presence of Australian government officials in meetings is greatly valued by the Thai side, by business and government people, and secondly, English language is not widely spoken, English is not widely spoken in Thailand, so that's a great facilitator to have local staff to interpret in those meetings.
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