Thailand’s Raimon Land eyes emerging markets to boost income
SET-listed developer Raimon Land Plc will shift to data centres, branded residential development and low-rise houses to tap emerging markets which will improve its annual revenue.
Chief executive Korn Narongdej said the data centre business had high potential for investment as it was infrastructure for the new economy.
Demand for this service, accelerated by the pandemic, has also kept growing.
“Data centres will help boost our recurring income from the current 5% to 20% of total revenue by 2024,” he said.
“We are considering the size and locations to develop which will be finalised by the end of this year.”
Possible locations will be close to water, which could be a river, the sea or a pond in industrial estates, as it will partner with Nautilus Data Technologies, a US-based company developing floating data centres with a patented design for water cooling technology.
“Costs and expenses for a water-cooled data centre are 20% lower than a traditional one. We will spend 18 months to develop the first water-cooled data centre in Thailand, set for completion in 2024,” he said.
Mr Korn said the company’s residential development business from now on will focus only on branded residences.
This concept can boost buyers’ confidence and command a higher price than non-branded and attract customers worldwide from a database of international hotel brands.
Mr Korn says the data centre business has high potential for investment.
The first project will be Rosewood Residences Kamala in Phuket worth 7.8 billion baht with 14 villas.
Each villa will comprise four to eight bedrooms priced from 100 million baht to over 1 billion baht.
This project will also be Rosewood’s first standalone residence in Asia-Pacific, scheduled to launch in the third quarter this year.
There will be two more branded residential projects launched this year.
One of them is planned to be a high-rise condo in Bangkok worth 5.5 billion baht which will be a joint venture with a landlord to minimise capital investment.
The other will be luxury low-rise houses in Bangkok which can help improve annual revenue as low-rise projects require only 12-18 months to complete, while its core product, high-rise condos, usually take 3-4 years.
The company aims to boost revenue from low-rise houses to 20-30% in the next five years.
It aims to have 7.2 billion baht in presales and 2.2 billion baht in revenue by the end of 2022.
Last year it recorded 2.1 billion baht in presales and 2.5 billion baht in revenue, down 30% and 20%, respectively, from 2020.
To date, the company has unsold, completed units worth 70 million baht remaining, down from 1.89 billion baht two years ago as sales were good during the pandemic, particularly from buyers in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Source: https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2309174/raimon-eyes-emerging-markets-to-boost-income
