Set up last year, SBU e-business focuses on five business areas - electronic procurement, multimedia, e-commerce, application services and electronic government.

Yodchai Kaewpensri, senior executive vice president of SBU e-business, said that for electronic procurement, the firm provides electronic auctions and business transactions over the Internet, which assists both the private sector and government agencies. For multimedia, the company plans to launch Internet protocol television (IPTV) in the next few years.

"The Olympics in China will be our first official television programme and we plan to provide more than 200 live broadcast IPTV channels to Internet users as well," he said.

It will also offer electronic learning to students and the education sector so the government could encourage distant learning to remote areas.

He said the e-commerce business areas would create an electronic marketplace and offer a service that would allow people to do e-commerce.

"We plan to set up CAT Pay Point to help people in the community conduct electronic business as it acts as a distribution point and marketplace. People could use this service in their business. Sellers will benefit by selling their products to customers worldwide. They just need to go to our counter services and a consultant will help them enter business electronically," said Yodchai

Meanwhile, Pay Point will also be a counter service where people pay for utility services, personal tax, mobile-phone bills and also make transport reservations.

The company plans to increase to more than 10,000 Pay Point service centres nationwide and hopes to begin a test run in the next couple of months, he said.

He added that the company believed that CAT's electronic marketplace would be the biggest electronic business service in the country. It would also help SMEs provide their services and products to customers more conveniently.

Meanwhile, in the application services area, the company will sell software services to large, medium and small businesses and they will not have to spend huge amounts of money to purchase licensed software. This service would also help the private sector reduce investment costs since they pay only for what they use.

"We plan to offer software services in areas like customer relations management, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain management," he said.

The firm plans to offer Web conference facilities to business and end users who want to conduct electronic conferences between their branch offices and headquarters over the Internet.

He said the firm would also focus on electronic-government projects by providing e-mail and Web hosting services for government agencies.

Jirapan Boonnoon

The Nation