PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2017

EDITOUR PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 10/17 www.petpla.net 12 Tour Sponsors: Stable growth, new applications and an absence of recycling PET in Thailand and Laos by Kay Barton For the last stages of the South East Asia Road Show, the PETplanet team travelled to Thailand and Laos. As in several other South East Asian regions that we have already discussed, a few of the companies we visited were almost like old friends; between 2008 and 2010 our editors Wolfgang von Schroeter and Michael Maruschke were on location here for a long period and discovered the special characteristics of the individual markets. Of course, there has been plenty going on in the intervening seven to ten years both eco- nomically and technologically in the packaging markets. However, the available potentials have mostly offered space for moderate, continual growth in PET. In Thailand for example, the glass proportion for soft drinks was still comparatively very high until not so long ago. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing range of variations in PET not only for the drinks sector; countless non-food applications have become ever more popular and so have superseded other materials and formats. We hope you enjoy reading this last part of our Editour in this Drinktec year 2017. Get in touch with… economy & infrastructure Thailand With an area of just over 513,000km 2 , the Kingdom of Thailand is the third largest nation in South East Asia after Indonesia and Myan- mar. The northern part of the country borders Myanmar in the north-west and west. Further to the south-west lies the Andaman Sea and in the far south of Thailand is the border with Malaysia. In the south-east, the country borders the Gulf of Thailand, an offshoot of the South China Sea; in the east is the border with Cambo- dia and further to the north is Laos. The mountainous northern region with its last offshoots of the Himala- yas also boasts the highest point in Thailand with an altitude of 2,565m. The north-south axis of the country measures 1,770km and the east-west axis is 780km at the widest point and a narrow 64km at the “Isthmus of Kra” in the south. The country is divided into six regions with a total of 76 provinces. Right into the north, there are barely any temperature variations throughout the entire year, with an average temperature of just under a tropical 20°C. The monsoon influence showers the north with around one third of the year’s precipitation, while in the south it can be more than three quarters. Population growth in Thailand continues to decline slightly. While at the beginning of the 2000s it was around 1% annually, today it is around a mere 0.3%. Today’s average age of the almost 69 million Thais (2016) is around 34. Half of these live in cities and urban areas with around 8.9 million in the capital Bangkok, a city whose infrastructure is both carrot and stick. On the one hand it is the economic centre and with more than 50,000 new apartments per year offers space for workers and families. On the other hand however, there are several problems that can be traced back to one main issue: the city is growing too quickly. Solutions such as the well-constructed local trans- port system provide little assistance against the endlessly appearing traffic jams on inadequate roads and tribu- taries where extensive blockages are caused every day on both inbound and outbound routes. The public ele- vated “Skytrain” railway connects the most important districts of Bangkok with one another and is to be vastly extended over the coming years with a primary investment of over US$ 9 million in local transport. A further problem is the non-centralised and extensive water and sewage system, which however has been tackled by town planning within the “Bangkok City Plan” of 2013. Traditionally, Thailand is an export country that experiences highs and lows. In the 1950s, the private sector was able successively to supersede the state sector. Following an eco- nomic high in the 1960s with annual growth rates of around 8%, the