Annual General Meeting & Monthly Luncheon with Google

On October 30 at the Movenpick BDMS Wellness Resort Bangkok, over 160 attendees gathered to hear from Google Thailand’s Napatra Charassuvichakanich, insights on Building Thailand's Digital Future. Napatra, who manages the Financial Services sector for Google Thailand, works in partnership with key clients to digitize how financial services are discovered and sold to increasingly connected Thais. Drawing on Google’s insights, she highlighted the shifting trends in South East Asia’s internet economy, the challenges of funding and how businesses can seize opportunities in this growing industry.

The Southeast Asia internet economy hit inflection at $72B dollars in 2018. The initial challenge that Google saw was to compete for funding to come to SEA but as the digital industry gained momentum and the digital ecosystem matured, SEA’s internet economy hit an inflation because of the robust consumption of online on consumer’s side. Initially only brands that were internet ready adopted online platforms for advertising but soon with the progress across e-commerce, online media, ride hailing and online travel, advertisers had to shift their funding to digital, to catch the eyeballs of the consumers. 9 startups became regional unicorns such as Grab, GoJek, Lazada, etc. For Thailand, E-commerce and online media are two high-growth sectors and ride-hailing and online travel show steady growth.

Napatra further shared insights on the reasons why Thailand is the 2nd largest internet economy. With easy access to the internet and internet affordability, Thais have adopted the digital world at an accelerating pace and there has been a 7x growth in average data usage over the past 4 years. There has also been a surge in the digital payment transactions with wallet on Line and Rabbitpay. In order to leverage the rise of the internet economy, she emphasized on partnership with digital players and adoption of Artificial Intelligence to help supercharge business capacity.

The event then continued with a presentation by AMCHAM’s President Gregory Bastien, who summarized the growth of AMCHAM in 2019. With close to 100 new members, enhanced offerings such as a mini-site for our member’s directory profile, launch of the Member Plus app, over 200 events and over 40 advocacy initiatives; AMCHAM continues to grow as an inclusive and diverse business community and offers services that is relevant for its members. Gregory also announced the raise in membership fees that will continue to support these activities and enhanced services in 2020.

Candidates of AMCHAM's People's Choice Awards - Chevron, Citibank, GSK, Grand Hyatt Erawan Bangkok, Microsoft, Minor International, Seagate and WHA Group also showcased their CSR projects at the start of the event to so members can cast their vote for their favorite project under this special award category.

At the close of the event, Jeff Lehrmann, Managing Director, Chevron and AMCHAM Governor announced the Governors-elect for the 2020-2021 term which can be found here. More photos of the event can be found on AMCHAM's Facebook album.