If it had not been for a series of failures 15 years ago, Chanitr Charnchainarong might not have become the president of Thailand's Market for Alternative Investment (MAI).

Now Chanitr, 44, is the youngest man ever to head up the MAI and he's also president of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Society of Thailand.

His beginnings were very different. Chanitr gained bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University in the US. Looking for a career in engineering, he never dreamed that finance would become a dominant part of his life.

After graduating, Chanitr got a taste of the financial world by taking a training job with his uncle at Poonpipat Finance and Securities as a blue-suit order messenger.

"While in training, I decided that my heart was not in the financial business at all," he recalls.

Then he took his first step into engineering with a position at Seagate Technology (Thailand) as an officer in the customer service department. Even though the job didn't directly involve engineering, he enjoyed the work for three years, before moving to a new position as a sales engineer for Hewlett-Packard (Thailand), responsible for selling workstation computers to corporate customers in 1990.

There he was trained in sales and products, as well as how to make a sales presentation. He soon enjoyed success, received several sales awards and performed well until, after three years, he struck a problem. He didn't realise at the time, but it was going to change his life.

"I was confident in my sales skills," he says, "but I had a big problem when I approached corporate customers. I could not understand my customers' financial requirements, so I could not prepare proper financial models for them to show why they should buy the products."

With his lack of financial knowledge, Chanitr failed to win a deal, even though he was given the chance to present his product directly to the chief executive while his competition did not. He lost the potential customer because he was ill-equipped to offer a financial deal that suited his customer's circumstances.

"I didn't know that my customers required special financial conditions because I could not analyse their payment ability, nor understand profit and loss, or read a customer's balance sheet, and my competitors did. This lost the deal because my competitor could offer the customer better financial programmes, like leasing," he explains.

Once was bad enough, but the same failure happened three times, and it forced Chanitr to rethink.

"I realised that when I sold products I was thinking of my side of the deal and not the customer's side," he says.

He quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and returned, crestfallen, to his uncle's financial company - the one he had already decided wasn't for him. This time, he started from the bottom and studied hard for two years. He also took a course at the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute, formerly known as the Association for Investment Management and Research.

He spent a total of six years progressing from CFA stage one to CFA stage three, the highest level. He is one of only 25 Thai students to have graduated from CFA stage three.

Then, equipped with new knowledge, the engineering salesman turned to work in the financial field. At Siam TV Group, he was chief financial officer for three years before moving to a financial position with Channel 5 for another three years.

With experience in both technology and finance, he decided to set up a venture capital company called V-Net Capital, by joining with a local investor in 1999. It aimed to provide start-up funding for new companies, mainly technology firms.

Then Chanitr was selected for membership of an advisory board to the MAI in 2004 and, finally, was appointed as the market's new president earlier this year.

His goal as the MAI's president is to built the market up to be recognised as the secondary market, in the same way as the NASDAQ is in the US, within his four-year term. To gain such recognition, he believes the MAI should have at least 100 listed companies with a market value of about Bt40 billion.

Currently, the MAI's value is about Bt18 billion, and it's expected to reach Bt20 billion by the end of this year. The target is Bt30 billion with the next few years. It now has 38 listed companies and it is hoped the figure will reach 50 companies next year.

These days, Chanitr claims that his success came from his earlier failure. He says his lessons in the past have been a key driver to help him create his present life.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation