Thai Beverage Plc (ThaiBev), Thailand's biggest drinks company, yesterday announced plans to reshuffle its management structure as it looks to support growth in the beer business in Asean.
The restructuring comes after the company recently won the bidding for a nearly 54% holding in Saigon Beer Alcohol Beverage Corp (Sabeco).
In addition, Fraser and Neave (F&N), a food and drink group under ThaiBev, recently won approval from Myanmar's investment commission to return to Myanmar's beer market.
Under the new management structure, Thapana Sirivadhanabhakdi, chief executive of ThaiBev, becomes chief beer officer. Mr Thapana will be directly involved in the group's beer business, which contributes up to 40.1% of sales, while the spirits business makes up 47.4% of sales.
Edmond Neo Kim Soon, the company's chief executive for beer business, will become executive vice-president and chief brand investment officer to look after branding strategies for the company's drinks in Thailand and Asean.
"We want to pay more attention to the beer business because we have invested almost US$5 billion (161.9 billion baht) in two investment deals in Vietnam and Myanmar," Mr Soon said.
With the Sabeco acquisition, the market share of ThaiBev's beer sales in the Asean market jumped to 24% from 8%.
ThaiBev has now become the beer leader in Asean (where total consumption is 11 billion litres), about two years ahead of an earlier plan that targeted 2020.
"My responsibility for the beer business is to ensure that we will be able to generate organic growth and a good return on investment to the company," Mr Thapana said. "I also want to create a good synergy between the company's operations across the region from Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand, and a strong foothold of operations in Singapore and Malaysia."
Apart from Vietnam and Thailand, Myanmar will play a more significant role in the company, he said.
ThaiBev's Myanmar brewery started production in August this year, and the beer products, which are under the company's existing brands, including Chang, will be launched for sale this month.
Capacity in Myanmar is now 50 million litres a year and will be expanded to 120 million litres.
Mr Soon said there is huge potential for the beer market in Myanmar because per capita consumption is only 7.5 litres, compared with 44 litres in Vietnam and 26 litres in Thailand.
ThaiBev sales reached $8.8 billion last year. Of total sales, 60% were from the domestic market, 36% from Asean and 4% from the rest of the world.
Mr Thapana said Asean will become the fourth-largest economy in the world by 2030 (up from seventh now).
"There is currently more than a 600 million population in Asean, which is higher than the EU," he said. "The region's economy has been stimulated by a high number of tourists and young consumers. Asean also has many trade agreements with other economies.
"Moreover, the CLMV plus Thailand in particular have a high population of more than 300 million all together, so that it becomes a sizeable market with a young population. They are among the countries with the highest GDP growth in the world. Myanmar and Vietnam, for example, enjoy strong GDP growth of more than 6% annually, which is two times higher than for Thailand."