The gim way of doing business

The Sasin business school's Global Initiatives in Management (GIM) programme has become a new platform for members of global-minded Thai business families to trial their overseas business ambitions.

The Nation's Pichaya Changsorn talked with Dr Piyachart Phiromswad, faculty adviser of the GIM programme, and his former student Chayaphol Leeraphante, who is assisting his family business Mallika Interfood with its expansion into the Japanese market.

Faculty adviser Dr Piyachart Phiromswad said Sasin's GIM programme was inspired by a similar curriculum that the school's partner institute, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in the US, has conducted for several years, but was the first of its kind in Thailand. Under the programme, students pick countries and businesses to study and undertake research under the guidance of the faculty and on field trips.

The GIM programme has three main objectives. The first is giving students an international perspective.

"A domestic education may no longer be sufficient, in this age of globalisation. A good MBA student should possess an international perspective and is capable of putting it to use," he said.

The second objective is work-experience simulation: A group of student leaders is formed and each leader is responsible for a different position, such as logistics leader, public relations leader, overall leader and curriculum leader. Through this system, the students learn how to work together. The third objective is research. Students can pick from the subjects that really interest them.

"Take the case of Khun Pond [Chayaphol Leeraphante], whose family is in the food business. This course provided him with a chance to undertake in-depth research into Japan's food business sector. An important point is that since the subjects are in the areas of the students' interests, they will be devoted and attentive. What they learn is relevant to what they want to do," said the Sasin lecturer.

Chayaphol Leeraphante, a former student of Piyachart's, said his family's Mallika group, which operates a number of Thai restaurants, bakeries and pizza-and-pasta shops, as well as a Natural Gas for Vehicles (NGV) business, aspires to expand overseas. Thus, he is pleased to have been able to take GIM classes for the past two years. The programme took him to Vietnam and Japan.

Chayaphol said his original GIM proposal was to study opening a Thai restaurant in Japan, but from his initial GIM research he found there were many limitations. He changed the subject to the prospects of Thai food businesses in Japan as a result of the Japan-Thailand Economic Partnership Agreement (Jtepa).

Thanks to his discoveries, Chayaphol said Mallika was now almost ready to begin shipping its frozen foods to serve Thai restaurants in Japan.

On the other hand, Chayaphol said he found it was not feasible to export frozen foods to Vietnam because the country has the same or even better technologies than Thailand in the business.

"But there is good potential for opening ice cream shops in Vietnam, because the milk industry is controlled by the state. It would work well if we ship ice cream from Thailand [made from Thai milk]," he said.

Nonetheless, Mallika has not yet made any inroads into the Vietnamese market because of its concerns about the country's macroeconomic situation, he said.

Sasin's Piyachart said the institute had benefited from the fact that, unlike other Thai colleges, as many as 60 per cent of its MBA students are Thais who are graduates from high schools or universities abroad, and 10 per cent are foreign students. Last year, for example, GIM had a Japanese student who helped other students with business contacts, cultural difficulties and other things.

Chayaphol said some students had clinched business deals during their GIM studies, such as one GIM-Japan classmates who, after studying about the different requirements of Japanese consumers, won an order for dried foods from a Japanese distributor. Another colleague was able to sell apparel to Japan.

Sasin's GIM class comprises an 11-week curriculum in Bangkok and one or two weeks on an overseas business field trip. It is a compulsory programme for MBA students who choose international business as their major, and an elective course for other MBA students. There were 23 students studying the GIM course in its first year, and the number more than doubled to 50 last year, said Piyachart. Following expressions of interest from executive MBA students, Sasin is drafting a GIM curriculum for an EMBA class, he said. Sasin is part of Chulalongkorn University.

pichaya@nationgroup.com