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"The competition in the global market is very tough, so we cannot avoid boosting our competitiveness by making products that help boost our customers' competitiveness as well," director Win Viriyaprapaikit said yesterday.

The country's steel industry has already passed two waves of developing bars and sheets in the last 10-15 years. Now it is time to move forward to the third wave, which involves technology development, he said.

The group aims to allocate 1 per cent of sales to creating a research-and-development (R&D) centre and producing high-skilled human resources.

It plans to complete the R&D centre in 10 years at the soonest. However, it hopes to be able to design products for customers in the third year.

"We hope to see R&D collaboration between local steel-makers and customers such as auto-makers here. This will happen sooner if the government takes serious action and draws up the national model for steel development," he said.

A chronic problem for Thailand is the shortage of highly-skilled workers. This has been the main obstacle to developing the country into a knowledge-based powerhouse, he said.

"Improving our human resources is very hard and challenging. Therefore, we have to create a shortcut by granting scholarships to our high-potential engineers to study in a specific steel field overseas and persuade foreign technicians and specialists to work with us," he said. The company has also joined hands with local vocational colleges to design steel courses and support training classes in order to produce more technicians for the industry.

Internally, it implemented its own knowledge management system last year by collecting and registering all data and sharing files across the organisation to promote employee education.

"We hope that our human resources can share and exchange their knowledge and experience in the globally-accepted stage some day. Our final goal is to become the world's preferred supplier of steel," he added.