The youngest of three children, he saw his father's construction business collapse in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis with the bank threatening to take possession of their home. Tob imbibed such survival lessons at an early age. Tob parlayed a stall selling roasted chestnuts into a $1.1 billion enterprise. "We have to be big or we cannot survive." Taokaenoi depends on imports from South Korea, but Tob insists that it secures "competitive rates." The capacity expansion and export push are crucial, he says, for achieving his target of doubling revenue by 2024. But, she adds, the company remains vulnerable to price increases of its main raw material. Uraiwan Tantisuwannakul, an analyst with CIMB Securities (Thailand), points out that the eight-year tax break that the new unit enjoys, combined with productivity gains and cost savings, should make Taokaenoi more competitive. Chief operations officer Boonchai Kowpanich, who oversees the newly-opened unit, says it needs a third of the 3,000 who are employed at the old factory. Traditional labor-intensive production, whereby seaweed is manually fried (or roasted) in woks, has been replaced here with automation, using imported Korean and Japanese machines and some equipment that was developed in-house. Adjacent to Taokaenoi's 7-acre complex, is, ironically, a PepsiCo plant producing Lay's potato chips. It is located in an industrial park 47 miles north of Bangkok, close to the historic city of Ayutthya, the former capital of the Kingdom of Siam. He's used half the $42 million IPO proceeds to build a new factory that will produce exclusively for export. Unfazed, Tob is in the throes of doubling Taokaenoi's annual production capacity to 12,000 tons. In the American market, as in China, Taokaenoi will have to fight it out with earlier Korean and Japanese arrivals. "The next stop has to be the U.S., as that's the world's biggest snacking market," he says. "The IPO price hadn't fully factored in the China play," says Nantika Wiangphoem, an analyst at Bangkok securities firm DBS Vickers, who tracks the company.Īt his company's Bangkok headquarters, Tob, wearing a solid black T-shirt, the color preferred by his icon Steve Jobs, admits to eyeing an even bigger play: to make Taokaenoi a global brand. Analysts say the post-IPO buzz around Taokaenoi was also sparked by rising sales in China, the company's biggest overseas market, which contributes more than a third to revenues.
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