Business
Budding tycoon wants to do it his way
ALTHOUGH he is the third generation of a Thai auto dynasty – the Phornprapha family –Praput, 23, wants to make his own destiny running an Internet related service company, rather than entering his parents well established business.
Being born into a wealthy family, Praputt is luckier than a million other young people of his age. But the young man felt the need to stand on his own feet and run his own business, separate from the family firm
So he founded zdirectory.com last year to offer a Web-based Thai corporate profile directory service.
The company will create a complete corporate profile on a website for a customer and post on its zdirectory.com website .With this, the customer’s products can be seen worldwide.
Since the business is new to Thailand, the only son of Khunying Pornsan Kumlang –Eg (Phornprapha) is facing an uphill task in making prospective clients realize how his service can support their businesses.
Praputt was first sent to study in Britain when was eight, before entering the London School of Economics (LSE), a world- renowned educational institute.
In the UK, the young man learned a lot of new things. He said School in Britain are able to keep pace with a fast changing world and even introduced Internet courses to classes of young children.
When he went to the LSE, Praputt matured, accruing a great deal of business knowledge and strategies as well as making several friends who were later to become his business supporters and colleagues.
One of his formative experiences was to help his professor at the LSE research the website design of 500 companies around the world.
“I had to interview these companies to learn about their web-based strategies. I found that some of them overspent on their web investment, which only gave them a small return. Some put too many features on the websites which again to attract sufficient customers or improve the business,” he said
He realized the power of the Internet in the UK when he saw small banks had started using the Internet as a tool to steal market share from the larger, established banks who slower in utilizing the strength of the Internet.
“The aggressive move by the small banks pressured the big banks to change their ways of doing business. It was then I saw the potential of the Internet,” Praputt said.
He said that to attract visitors to a customer’s website, it must be designed in a user-friendly way that is simple and easily accessible.
“I used everything I had learnt to develop the website for my company,” Praputt said.
His training also taught him not to rush into launching the business in Thailand. Instead, he had his M Corp company carry out three years of market research first.
Praputt established M Corp with three foreign friends while he was in London to be his IT market research arm.
Later, he also teamed up with Active 8, an Iranian-owned IT strategy development company to help promote the service of his Zdirectory.com.
Currently, his company has four major shareholders, Praputt himself, M Corp, Active 8 and Krit Narongdej , his cousin and an executive at KPN, a major car company.
Praputt said that his business needed to have several things upgraded since the start-up on Jan l.
“I am also looking for a partner to whom I can link my website with. A number of companies have contacted me about of companies have contacted me about joint ventures and I am very proud of this. My business has only just started but already many companies want to work with me,” he said.
The young entrepreneur declined to reveal how many customers his company had, or its revenue. He just said that Zdirectory.com has a very promising future.
“Another thing I can tell you is that we are planning to establish three new businesses. One of them will be a multimedia company.” Praputt said.
He said that before, when he saw other people running businesses, he felt enthusiastic about running his own but the reality is completely different from what he imagined.
“I have to learn much more, especially when working with Thai people. They have a different working culture to my foreign partners. The foreigners like to share their opinions me, but Thai workers just wait for my orders,” Praputt said.
He said this did not discourage him in the least. He plans to introduce Western-style methods to his Thai workers to improve the company’s efficiency. So far the company has 11 staff.
“However, I also have to adapt myself to get along well with all my workers and the new working environment,” he said.
