Google gets started with Southeast Asia Expansion, opens an Office in Thailand

We recently reported that Google is eyeing Southeast Asia for expansion. The search-engine giant has now taken a major step towards this goal by opening an office in Thailand, according to The Nation.

Google has appointed Ariya Banomyong, former Chief Commercial Officer of True Corporation’s Convergence as its first country manager for Thailand. Ariya will oversee Google’s sales and business-development operations in this country.

The search engine giant hosts a variety of Internet-based services and products and generates revenue mainly from advertising. The company is planning to encourage local businesses to go online successfully, and to increase online-advertising spending in the Thai market from the current level of only 0.3 per cent of total advertising spending to a level closer to that in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, which have online-advertising spending of 30 to 50 per cent.

“The number of mobile-Internet users in Thailand is expanding rapidly, having grown three-fold in 2009 and 2010 to represent about 40 per cent of all Internet users. Every day, three out of every five Thai smartphone users employ a search service. This figure is higher than that in many developed countries, including the US, the UK, Germany and Australia. And the most important key word of these mobile searches is restaurant. Through their search behavior, these people are obviously telling us what products and services they are looking for. Our mission is to help businesses to utilize and benefit from this searching,” Ariya stated.

Thailand has around 25 million Internet users, and about 40 per cent of these users access the Internet via mobile devices. Of all the counties in Southeast Asia, Thailand has the highest number of searches – 55 million per day. This makes the country a potential market for Google in Asia.