mynextgig

33 minutes ago, JAS21 said:

That seems a good price …I paid 6K each for four two meter long piles about three years ago now … nothing has fallen down yet.

 

Thanks for letting me know. They do look good, they literally drill them into the ground and can be installed close to walls etc.

Wondering if anyone has any experience of Kemrex pile screws for foundations ?

Our house is in Bangkok and the land is very soft here, the piles our house is built on are at least 25m deep. These pile screws from Kemrex are 3m deep and according to the supplier and marketing material, can bear significant loads as an alternative to typical piles.

We actually need them to concrete the walk ways around the house, the supplier has suggested a number of Kemrex piles that can bear up to 3 tons per m2, which is way more than the concrete would weigh. Wondering if anyone else has used these before.

Attaching a photo of my my son, this photo is 6 days after a jellyfish sting in Hua Hin. 2 hours into our holiday, i took my 3 children into the sea after checking with the local security guard that the beach was safe. Within a few minutes my son started screaming that he had been stung by a Jelly Fish. I was able to put vinegar over his leg and arm and then took him to the local Bangkok Hospital where they covered him in steroid cream and then wrapped him in bandages which we had to return to re-dress every day.

This happened in July 2013, now all the scabs have gone and he has deep scarring on his leg and arm, i think they will be with him for the rest of his life.

The hospital, the staff at the hotel and the medical staff at Suvarabhumi airport were all very unsurprised by the state of my sons injuries, i suspect this is alot more common that you would think.

Be very careful during the wet season around the waters of Thailand. I dont know what kind of Jellyfish stung my son, but his inuries are as much as a warning as anyone would need i think.

My company has offered me a job in the USA and would cover all the visa requirements for me, my thai wife and 2 children to relocate. Does anyone know how easy it is for my wife's mother to get a visitors visa and how long they are normally issued for ? I think my wife would be happier with the move if she knew her mother could visit for a couple of months each year.

Any experience of this situation ?

My son just started at Rasami 2 weeks ago, PM me and i will give you updates over the next few weeks. So far looks like a really well run school, all lessons are in english (except Thai language) and it follows the UK education curriculum.

My son is coming upto 4, the fees are 65,000b per term (3 terms), plus 5,500b a term for lunch. They waived the 60,000b enrollment fee, based on us signing up for this term.

Also you need to buy the uniform, which came to about 10,000b.

I have 2 older children that go to a private school in the UK, i will gladly post some comparisons between Rasami and the UK school over time for reference. Certainly Rasami fees are a lot less than the UK fees.....

Some friends of mine are coming to a wedding in Bangkok in April and need a baby sitter for the evening, anyone know of any Baby Sitting agencies ? The hotel they are staying in doesnt provide this service apparently.

I think honestly this price differential between new and old is simply down to supply and demand. People tend to want the shiny new and somewhat cramped as opposed to grey, old but spacious. Is there any analysis available that shows cost per sqm across a range of ages ? I suspect value depreciates quite quickly in the 1st 2-3 years and then levels out into a more static range.

I dont own a condo in bangkok, when you get your title deeds does it allocate you a shareholding of the development ?

If by some miracle you can get all co-owners onto the same page this would only work here if new condo units prices were very very high, and the spread between rising land values and the flat growth of older condominium units grew significantly.

But if the land values were rising wouldn't the value of the individual units in that building rise also?

Not in proportion. The building will depreciate due to age, outdated materials and services, and space layout. Example, note the difference in the design of windows and balconies of present condos with those of the 80s and 90s.

So is it fair to say that the older the building the lower the price per sq ft ?

In Singapore between 2006 and 2008 there was a phenomenon in the condominium market known as en-bloc. This was driven by the high demand from foreign investment for new condo units often funded by the developer on a deferred payment plan.

Condo developments built 10-20 years ago in Singapore tended to be large units, on large plots of land providing spacious common areas. At regular intervals, the Singapore government would reissue guidelines governing height restrictions and plot ratio (how many units allowed per plot size) and so developers would often lobby all the owners of an old condo development to sell at an inflated market price, knock the whole thing down and rebuild a new development with x times more units. I believe the rule was that 80% of the owners had to agree to sell to make a majority decision, the 20% had no choice.

Many owners made a lot of money from this in the beginning, selling their units at upto double the market price, but as the property market rose rapidly in 2007 the price offered to owners who agreed to en-bloc sell their units was often at or below market value 12 months later when the deal actually executed. This resulted in some high profile cases where groups of owners tried to back out of the deals they had originally struck or tried to renegotiate based on the market conditions at the time of the deal.

When the market started to flatten out in late 2008 and into 2009 en-bloc sales ground to a halt, many of the people that had agreed to buy the new developments created out of en-bloc were forced to pulled out because they used deferred payments and couldnt afford to complete. As a result the singapore property market stalled leaving 1000's of unsold units and many developments virtually shutting down operations.

The interesting dynamic from this en-bloc market was that older more spacious property in singapore became very sought after as investers searched for developments that stood a chance of being snapped up En-bloc. En-bloc deals are still happening in singapore now and so still older more spacious properties still carry a premium.

So does this market exist in Bangkok, definately older developments offer much more space than the newer ones both within the units and the common areas surrounding them. But does the intrinsic value of a condomunium reduce as the unit ages (out of fashion) or does the space and devolopment potential make it more attractive ?

Paulo, looking back through your previous posts and screenshots you obviously like MACD as an indicator, presume you use this to measure overbrought/oversold conditions.

I notice that you change your parameters quite regularly for the MACD, and you certainly arent using the default 12,26,9.

Care to divulge your usage of this indicator and how you decide which settings you want to use ?

Just in case none of you noticed:

THB to Euro today: 40.5

Total disaster for me. The euro has lost 20% against the THB in about half a year.

Just great.

Its not the baht that's about to crash, but the euro is. And until the EU countries get their debt <deleted> together its going to keep dropping.

I am really working and saving hard for my investment capital in Thailand and the goal posts just keep moving further away.

However, once the business is running its good that my customers are paying in dollars. The dollar has been sitting on 32.something the last months

EUR broke all support levels yesterday against the USD, its ripe for a big drop over the next few months with parity a distinct possibility.

GBP was holding its own until the election debarcle and is currently sitting at around 1.46, if the UK end up with a hung parliment expect your GBP to buy you 42-43 THB over the next couple of months.

Anyone in Thailand living off income from Euro or Sterling is going to have a tough time for at least the remainder of this year.

My advice (for what its worth), hedge yourself by converting a years worth of funds to USD now. Alternatively SGD is quite a good currency to hedge with as its fixed against a basket of currencies, i suspect including THB but the MAS do not publish this, and you will find that the SGD/THB has been fairly stead at 23-24 against THB throughout the financial crisis.

If your current set-up in the UK can support the innitial start up period then yes go ahead there are plenty of ex-pats that you could employ to do the work at half the cost of your present ones,it is all about the start up and stabilising of the company in Bangkok first...after this you should be ok,there are more and more companys doing this now.

Surely for this sort of business in Thailand, Work Permits for expats will be a big problem I suspect...and even an expat in Thailand will want more money than you would have to pay for people in say India.

Would suggest to the OP that there are easier places than Thailand to make a business like this work..

Totally agree, i have alot of experience in setting up service centre's (internal support) in the corporate world across Asia and the biggest flaw has been accent when using Indian employees. There are call centre's training India employees to sound like they are scottish, london, midlands etc but these staff are going to be expensive.

There has been a big shift in recent years from India to the Phillipines for call centre's because the Filipino accent is much more understandable than Indian to Europeans and Americans. Additionally, the market in India is saturated, driving salaries up due to lack of staff and so the Phillipines is a lower cost option with well educated individuals. If you have an American Express card in Asia, you will be talking to a helpdesk person in the Philipines, same with many of the banks like DBS, HSBC etc etc.

Thai's just simply dont have necessary level of english compentency to make this work and with the Thailand rules around hiring x number of Thai's per foreigner, the idea of hiring expats will be a major obstacle.

Gig, yes, I understand your friend's problem. At all times, he should have a 'partner' with him that is at the same level.

For my company, with my Thai partner, I also got a Japanese one with it... So over the last 5 years, we have done so many customer-visits, but always, there was a minimum of 2 persons going in.

For Thai customers, I would come along, say the usual things like hello, coffee please and yes I'm married but don't speak the language.

After that, my colleague takes over and starts the sales-talk. No need for me to say or understand anything.

Same for Japanese companies, we'd go there 3 of us. Say pleasant things, then my Japanese colleague takes over...my Thai colleague talks with some of the Thai people attending the meeting and I enjoy the coffee and answer questions if and when they come.

Crucial to Thai people (I think) that you show them: hey, yes I'm Farang, but I know very well that I can't do it without my Thai colleagues.

Does give funny situations every now and then as well. My colleague always drives, has a nice Camry and I always sit next to him in the front. Several times we get to the security guard, my colleague talks with him about who we want to meet (The Japanese boss for example) and then tells him to drop me (boss) off at the entrance first and then park the car over there....

Never under-estimate the cultutal differences of doing business in Asia. I have lived and working in several countries in Asia for 10 years now and without a doubt knowledge of and adherance to certain cultural nuances make all the difference in building lasting relationships and succeeding in business.

There are a number of books out there covering business culture in China, not sure i have ever seen one for Thailand. Maybe a business opportunity there....

Congratulations. If your netting 137 pips per day you'll soon be able to trade full time with your own account, and give up selling signals Paulo.

Totally agree ! 3000 pips a month on a standard lot trade is $30,000 a month, and it you are that consistent you should be trading 10+ standard lots a pop. What an earth are you wasting your time on here for.....

I know a dozen hedge fund managers that would pay you millions for that strategy!

Schuimpje, what a great story and a real testament to the perseverance required to be successful at a startup business in general and especially when doing it in a completely new language and culture.

I have a friend that owns a recruitment company, sourcing employees for factories in Thailand. He speaks some Thai but certainly not enough to conduct business in the language and he has told me that he frequently finds that the more senior managers at the companies that he recruits for will simply not deal with him because of this fact, even though they are totally fluent in English having to converse with their foreign suppliers regularly.

I think many people completely under estimate the task of setting up any company, small, medium or large. It is crucial to keep overheads low and cash flowing in the early stages, which means you end up doing everything yourself, including the menial tasks. Anyone doing this in Thailand because they want an easy life in the sun should think again, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week i think will be pretty normal.

Any more experiences out there ?

If you are talking about a 50 - 100 mil THB turnover, yes then I fall within your criteria.

Started the company close to 5 years ago.

Currently employ 19 people.

Just moved to a larger factory/warehouse in a Free Zone

The first 3 years where living hel_l.

Let me know if you'd like to hear more about it and I'll go into more details.

Hi Schuimpje

Definately keen to hear more, no need to talk specifics of what your company does, but really keen to hear some of the stumbling blocks you hit along the way, how you overcame them and why you chose to do business in Thailand.

Also, do you speak or read Thai and do you think this was a benefit/hinderance to your success ?

Rgds,

gig

I would like to hear the experiences of any members that have setup and are currently or have previously managed a company in Thailand with a turnover of 50-100M +

Lets not get into which business ideas work and which dont, i am purely interested in the actual logistics of managing a medium sized company such as legal aspects, tax, staffing, marketing etc in comparison to other countries.

I see many posts on here discussing how difficult it is to run a business in Thailand and that the majority fail in the 1st couple of years, but i think that actually that's true in most other countries.

In the west, it is a low percentage of people that actually setup their own companies, most generate their income by working for someone else. In Thailand there are not the same opportunities open to foreigners and so its reasonable that a higher percentage of business ventures will fail because not everyone possesses the necessary business accumen to be successful on their own.

Keen to hear some experiences from those that have been successful.

I have been following this thread from the beginning but haven't replied yet because I did want to be either too critical nor too positive.

Being too critical could be seen as looking down at your abilities and being too positive could be seen as looking down at the abilities of others.

It's rather hard to tell at what level you are.

We have seen you in a video explaining the tones (which was a nice try, but I wouldn't advice any Thai language student to study the tones with this video).

In a second video we saw you saying a few numbers and a few sentences that seem come out of a guidebook. There was no real interaction, no real conversation. We also didn't see you reading Thai.

Before I travel to another country I usually learn to pronounce the numbers in the local language (on the airplane). I learn how to say "how much?", "agreed", "can you give a reduction?", "hello", "welcome", "goodbye" and some other very basic sentences. I use a guidebook and if possible some mp3 files. I can't tell from the video if this is also what you did.

If you really spent only 5 to 10 hours studying Thai I have to say you did "ok" until "good".

But for a polyglot that stayed 2 months in Thailand with website called "fluent in 3 months" and with very high ambitions, the results you've shown us are rather limited or maybe even disappointing.

I could understand about 70% of your video, not too bad. But it was very, very "simple" Thai (all out of lesson 1 or 2 of any Thai language book or out of a guidebook).

It might be possible that your Thai language skills are better than what we've seen in the video... again it's hard to say.

Anyway, goodluck with your Thai language study. I hope you'll go on with it. It's a beautiful language.

I like Kris have been watching this from the sidelines for the very same reasons.

I think the OP either underestimated the task he set about, or didnt have the time to dedicate to this but in my opinion, anyone that put dedicated focus on learning key phrases in an 8 week period could get to this level.

As per many other posts, the phrases used are very basic guide book phrases, and are not spoken like this in colloquial Thai.

The biggest flaw for me was the lack of demonstrable comprehension, the only phrases spoken by the Thai's he interacted with were numbers and the exception of the word FANTA which is pretty easily associated with ส้มน้ำ.

I think anyone that has spent time learning and speaking Thai will agree that the hardest part of conversational skills is comprehension and simply learning scripted sentences will cut short your attempts at engaging in conversation pretty quickly.

Sorry Benny, i think based on your intial claims, you bit off more than you can chew here.

I was in Bangkok at the weekend and the topic of the moment is the Government Savings Bank lottery savings scheme.

Looks like a standard bond with scaling interest rate of 1-7.5% over 1-5 years, so not particularly great returns. But it has a lottery system attached to it, where you can win anything from 300b to 75+million baht twice a month depending on the amount invested, the winnings get deposited into your GSB bank account. The savings certificate has a 6 digit number which is then drawn twice a month like the normal state lottery but appears to be a different scheme (i.e. not the main state lottery numbers).

http://www.gsb.or.th/lottery/lottery5.php

The current marketing is offering the chance to win 1 of 20 Mercedes C-Class if you invest before May.

Anyone know anything about this ? Is it a new scheme or just a current marketing promotion ?

Its only open to Thai's, but an interesting concept in saving. The Thai's are going crazy for this at the moment, my friend went to put some money into this last week and the guy standing in front of her was depositing 25 million Baht !!

Thai professionals are not nearly as underpaid as many seem think..... their actually is a growing middle class in Thailand

What would the salary range be for what we consider a middle class job in the US or Europe ? Doctor, Accountant, Trader, Lawyer etc

In the US or Europe a middle class salary for a profession requiring a degree and post graduate qualifications in my experience would be EUR100,000/$US150,000 upwards.

Anyone have any insight into what people in these professions would earn in Thailand ?

Hi All,

I know this post is quite old now, but keen to know how the OP got on with getting his thai gf out to Japan to visit

I have been offered a job in Japan, moving up from Hong Kong where i have been able to travel up to Thailand pretty easily on weekends and the GF can come across to Hong Kong without too much of a problem with immigration.

Obviously this will be more difficult if i move to Japan but if she can come up for a couple of weeks at a time then it should be ok.

I may have to go and work in Japan for 6-8 months and would like my Thai GF to come and visit for maybe 2-3 weeks.

Does anyone have any experience of Thai's visiting Japan on a social visit, it appears from the official website that Thailand is not a Visa exempt country so i assume she would need to apply before the visit.

Thanks in advance....

I took mine ice skating for the first time and they loved it (girls 6 and 8).

Thanks for all the responses !

Where is the ice skating rink ?

To those forum members with children, living in BKK, what do you do with them at the weekend ? Any suggestions on entertainment ?

My kids are aged 2, 6 and 8.