Seacon gm sets sights on aggressive growth

Seacon's general manager Supitcha Chaipipat

Our goal is to drive our sales to the Bt1billion mark by 2011," Seacon general manager Supitcha Chaipipat said while talking to The Nation last week.

However, she learnt about the business by leveraging her experi¬ence and education. Supitcha holds a bachelor's degree in accounting from Chulalongkorn University and a master's degree in the same field from Thammasart University. She also worked for five years in Siam Cement Group and another eight in property company Sansiri.

"I accepted that my educational background was not suited to the homebuilding business and knew that women usually find it difficult in this field. However, when I started working, I learnt that it wasn't as difficult if one knows what to do and how to communicate with the staff. The key to success in managing the business is communicating with the staff, learning what the customer wants and matching their expectations," she said.

Right from the outset, Supitcha set her sights on building Seacon into a brand that would have recall value with customers who plan to build a house. She also planned to reorganise the company's internal systems to support expansion and implemented an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage the busi¬ness.

Supitcha said one of her goals is to build the Seacon Home brand into a strong entity. This will be reflected in the company's sales growing between 10 per cent and 15 per cent a year. Her other two objectives include setting up the ERP system and generating a netprofit margin of 10 per cent in the next two years.

"We know that it is difficult to change an organisation's culture overnight. It takes time to set up the system and communication channels for our staff to understand the new business culture. However, we believe the system, set up with an investment of Bt2 million, will be instrumental in our achieving our business goals set for 2011," she said.

The next mission is to boost margins to 10 per cent. Supitcha said this is difficult because normally the homebuilding business generates margins of 5 to 6 per cent. The company has however, already succeeded taking its margins to between 6 and 7 per cent, which is better than the market average.