Thailand Tobacco Monopoly (TTM) expects higher revenue next year from its aggressive expansion into the Asean and Chinese markets.
Acting managing director Daonoi Suthinipapant said TTM was revising up its sales target for next year from the earlier projection of 32 billion cigarettes. The new target will be finalised on Sept 21-22.
"We are currently in talks with executives and related parties on the marketing strategy to capture opportunities in the Asean market as well as fixing the business direction to serve the new Asean market landscape," said Ms Daonoi.
In fiscal 2014, TTM targeted sales of 36 billion cigarettes or 50 billion baht, lower than a year before when it earned 60 billion baht.
The expected slow sales for 2014 have been attributed largely to political uncertainties depressing consumers' purchasing power.
Additionally, the new warning pictures on cigarette packs has discouraged sales.
The profit target for 2014 has been lowered to 6.7 billion baht from the earlier figure of 7 billion baht.
The slow down in revenue is also a reason for TTM moving forward its plan to produce a new brand for the overseas market to compensate for shrinking sales on the domestic front.
Ms Daonoi said the new brand was targeted at Asean and China.
"Many distributing companies and trading companies based in border provinces have expressed an interest in expanding into the overseas market," said Ms Daonoi.
She said TTM was now gathering data on each market as it needed to study their characteristics before finalising marketing plans for each market.
"We have to create a proper marketing network for the export market. We need a concrete plan before appointing distributors to cover each market as we have never worked with a distribution network before, as King Power was our only distributor in the past," said Ms Daonoi.
In a related development, investment for TTM's new factory may be cut by 1 billion baht to 5 billion baht after the board of directors decided to reduce the budget for new machinery as it found some of the older machines still work well.
The new factory is located at Rojana Industrial Estate in Ayutthaya and is scheduled to commence operation in March next year.