PC Home Online to set up e-commerce platform here

"Thailand is the best place to land because Thailand is the best economy in Southeast Asia, with good established infrastructure. And we have a great partner," Hung-Tze Jan, founder and chief executive officer of PC Home Online, said yesterday.

After spending US$3 million (Bt102 million) on developing systems and operations, PC Home (Thailand) will launch its consumer-to-consumer e-commerce platform in September with the goal of achieving more than 5 million product listings in its first year.

For the first three years, merchants can sell their goods free of charge. After that, they will have to pay a transaction fee of 1.5 per cent.

"We have many e-commerce models including C2C, B2C and B2C2C, but our first service is C2C. What we do is to complement Thailand’s e-commerce market to gather all viewers or traffic from the Asian region.

"We also help Thai e-commerce to do cross-border transactions, especially to the Taiwan market, which has huge room to grow at 60 per cent a year. Taiwan’s e-commerce market is valued at around Bt1.1 trillion," he said.

The company will provide its own e-payment platform but it will not dominate all the payments on it. The company offers a choice of payment for buyers. It is in talks with all banks in Thailand to provide e-payment services for buyers.

As the chairman of the Taiwan Internet and e-Commerce Association, Jan said that in a mature e-commerce market, for example Taiwan’s, e-commerce is about 8-9 per cent of the retail business, while in the United States it is about 11 per cent.

In Thailand it is only 0.2 per cent. The retail business here was about $90 billion in 2013 and increased to about $100 billion in 2014.

Thailand’s e-commerce market is expected to be about 5 per cent of the retail business in five to six years.

"C2C e-commerce is the most vibrant and most energetic. In Taiwan, PC Home Online has 95 million merchant accounts," he said.

About six or seven Taiwanese Internet-based businesses are already operating here, for example Easy Table, an online booking service for restaurants, and KKBOX, a music streaming service, he said.

More than 10 companies of all kinds of Internet services are coming to offer services such as real-time marketing, e-commerce and social networking.

PC Home Online also has been present in the United States for two years. Its e-commerce platform is gathering 4 million listings from more than 100,000 sellers.

The company also set up a business in Japan but it is not yet in service.

The firm is eyeing Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia next.

Simon Shen, CEO of Cal-Comp Electronics (Thailand), said the joint investment with PC Home Online was its latest move to go beyond hardware manufacturing towards the vibrant Internet business.

The company together with the leading Taiwanese e-commerce platform will help drive Thailand’s Internet market to the forefront in Asean.

"We have been in Thailand for 25 years. We have continuously invested in Thailand. Last year, we built one new plant, the ninth, worth Bt1.3 billion. This year, we’re continuing to invest at a similar amount to build one new plant," he said.

The company might make a move in the supply-chain industry, which is a potential growth area because of the good location and the readiness of the infrastructure and economy.

"Thailand is in the golden era for supply chains. We will invest more in logistics and supply chains, on one side. It can help strengthen our joint venture e-commerce business as well," he said. PC Home (Thailand) was capitalised at Bt100 million.