Thailand Post woos youth to collect stamps
THAILAND POST CO, which has seen a continued drop in stamp collecting, is encouraging young Thais to learn to collect postage stamps as part of the state agency’s strategy to boost its revenue.
Wiboon Sereechaiporn, vice president of Thailand Post’s philatelic marketing department, said revenue from sale of stamps was around Bt200 million a year, which is less than 1 per cent of total revenue.
“The age of most stamp collectors is above 50 years, so we’ve launched a project to tap the young generation and encourage them to learn more on the history of postage stamps. This will inspire them to become stamp collectors in the future,” Wiboon said.
Last week Thailand Post held a stamp-collection event in Chiang Mai to promote its new stamp collection marking the 720th anniversary of the “Rose of the North” this year.
It also organised a one-day trip for a group of students to Chiang Mai’s historic places shown on the stamps. This is the ninth year Thailand Post is holding this kind of event nationwide to encourage the younger generation to become stamp collectors.
Wiboon said that every year Thailand Post launches 35 stamp collections, and each collection now features only 500,000 stamp sets, down from 1 million sets earlier due to falling number of stamp collectors.
Currently, there are around 20,000 active stamp collectors in Thailand.
The state agency has also launched innovative stamp collections to woo buyers, such as scented stamps.
For the first quarter this year, Thailand Post’s revenue was Bt6.249 billion.
After expenditure of Bt5.248 billion it had a profit of Bt993 million. This year it aims to boost total revenue to Bt24 billion and profit to Bt3 billion, compared |with Bt22 billion in revenue and Bt2.5 billion profit last year.
