Geonoise Thailand founder juggles many businesses
Michael Rosmolen was born with a full entrepreneurial spirit.
As a boy of six in his native Holland, he began delivering milk, pastries, and newspapers before and after school, to earn some money. By the time he was a teenager, he had collected enough money to buy an IBM PC XT, which, nearly 30 years ago, cost the equivalent of Bt900,000.
While technologies have always been his passion, Rosmolen has often found himself an early mover at many different places and times. In 1980s Europe, noise - as an environmental pollutant - was still known as a "luxury problem". Nevertheless, Rosmolen studied for a master's degree in acoustic engineering, for which he had to move to neighbouring Belgium since there was no such course open in the Netherlands.
He launched a noise-consulting company, Rosmolen Bouw Akoestiek, in 1985 and a noise-control product-testing firm, ABC International Trading, six years later, both in the Netherlands.
Rosmolen fell in love with Thailand on his first visit, when he spent a holiday here 10 years ago. "I decided I wanted to come back to Thailand, so I set up shops [in Belgium] to sell Thai wood-carving products [and handicrafts]. Before that I had always been crazy about wood carvings from the Caribbean and other countries," he said.
It was in the Netherlands that Rosmolen met his Thai wife. After their three children were born, Rosmolen decided in 2004 to move to Thailand permanently. He launched Geonoise Thailand, a noise-consulting company, even though, in Thailand at that time, noise was the "luxury problem" it had been in Europe more than a decade earlier.
"The economy must be good before you think about noise control. But the fact is, noise can affect you very much. If you can't sleep well, you won't be in a good health," he said in an interview with The Nation.
As noise consulting was a niche business in Thailand, Rosmolen found himself with a lot of time on his hands. He began searching the Internet for Thai companies. "I found out that there were many good manufacturers and good products in Thailand, but they were very hard to find on the Internet," he said.
He decided to start QuinL Thailand in 2007, to develop a business-to-business e-commerce website, with the aim of helping Thai products to become better known to the world, and even among other Thai firms. He set up the company in Udon Thani, his wife's home town, even though only two years before that there had been no ADSL lines and he had been forced to rely on a satellite terminal for high-speed Internet access.
At present, Rosmolen is also a director of Richies Holdings, a Hong Kong firm with a staff of 200 and a factory in Udon Thani that manufactures and exports GPS tracking and tracing units for vehicles to Europe. As well, he is a director of H3 Singapore and W3 Thailand, which are planning soon to begin the production of microchips used in golf-ball finders at the Richies' Udon Thani plant. These will be sent for further assembly at the Rayong factory of Toppoint, the only golf-ball manufacturer in Thailand.
Rosmolen said the trackable golf balls would be exported under the brand name "Prazza". They had a promising market in Europe where, unlike in Thailand, golfers did not have "nice caddies" to help them to find lost balls.
He is also running some other businesses, including the only firm that will provide insurance for yachts with coverage higher than US$10 million (Bt326.88 million) in Phuket, and a company that exports Thai herbs.
As an entrepreneur, Rosmolen said he found doing businesses in Europe easier than in Thailand because there were many manuals and plenty of institutional support. But it was "more fun" in Thailand.
"I'm happier here. You can't be creative in Europe, where there are sets of rules prescribing what you can do. There are fewer regulations here, more freedom and a more realistic [environment]," he said.
Rosmolen's current focus is on QuinL, which he aims to develop into an equivalent of Alibaba.com, the major e-commerce website in China. QuinL's head office is in Udon Thani, where it employs 15 people, including computer programmers and web designers, while the Bangkok office has only five sales staff.
Rosmolen divides his time equally between Bangkok and Udon Thani. And according to a Thai business partner, there is little time wasted in travelling. A brand-new Mercedes-Benz whisks Rosmolen between the two cities - a distance of 600 kilometres - in an average four and a half hours.
"And you'll always see him smiling and relaxing. I have never seen him stressful or angry," said one of Rosmolen's Thai colleagues.
