Japanese offshore manufacturing in Thailand: its difficulties and future prospects

During the past decade, the market for consumer and industrial goods in South‐East Asia has grown at a rapid rate and industrial countries in this region have been trying to advance their national plans to stimulate economic take‐off. However, in the middle of 1997, the ASEAN bubble economy started to collapse after devaluation of the baht. In this paper the current status and future direction of Japanese manufacturers in Thailand are discussed through facts investigations and a survey execution. The results from this investigation indicate that the Japanese offshore manufacturers in Thailand are at an earlier stage than their domestic counterparts in Japan, in terms of manufacturing strategies and action programmes. Therefore, offshore manufacturers are in a much more severe situation than domestic firms, although one of their major reasons for joining the Thai manufacturing industry was to recover from the ending of Japan’s own bubble economy.